October Is Book Month wraps up by considering a book that never existed.

Yesterday, while coming up with a couple of mild japes (it's a real word)
about the two NFL teams that have yet to win a game (an annual
obsession of mine), I invented, on the spot, a book that never existed,
but should (John Tyler: Space President For Hire.) The idea for that book then settled into my imagination as I drove home from work last night listening to "All I Want Is You" from the Juno soundtrack, and I thought maybe that should be a book.

But
I didn't yet add it to the list of things I might write someday in my
tattered notebook of ideas because I was driving (which wouldn't keep
me from writing things in my notebook) and I didn't have a pen (which
would.)

I did, though, add the idea of books that never existed to the mental list of things that I wanted to write about on here, and I decided that books that never existed would be a good way to wrap up October Is Book Month for the year.

Authors have to do a lot of stuff in creating a world that allows us to create a world
in our imaginations, and most readers don't give a lot of thought to
the little tasks and problems that can crop up in the course of writing
a story.

But I do, because I not only read (a lot, but not as
much as I'd like) but I write (a lot, but not as much as I'd like) and
because I'm interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff; it makes the
in-front-of-the-scenes stuff more interesting to me.

Like this:
when you watch a movie scene, a particularly crazy movie scene, give
some thought to how many times they filmed that scene and how many
times the actors had to go through that exact scene
and hit their marks and say their lines and get the mood right… and
then think of how many times the set had to be redone and remade and
perfected.

I started thinking about that when I saw a preview of Pineapple Express,
a movie I never saw because, to be honest, I don't care all that much
for James Franco and I'm tired of Hollywood trying to convince me he's
a star…

… that was kind of mean, wasn't it? I have nothing against him personally and I liked him in Freaks and Geeks but beyond that, it's just, pleh. (Those mean little asides prompted The Boy to suggest that I create "The Worst Of Everything," but I don't know if I want to do that…)

…
but I did see the scene in the commercials where [IS IT A SPOILER ALERT
IF IT'S IN A COMMERCIAL? YES? OKAY, SPOILER ALERT FOR A COMMERCIAL!]
James Franco is driving a car in a chase and he kicks the window and
puts his foot through it, and in the commercial there are at least two
or three different camera shots, and after I watched the commercial I
didn't want to see the movie, but I did spend some time imagining how,
after each take, they would have to replace that broken car windshield,
clean up the fake blood, get all the extras back to their original
spots, move the car to its first position, then move the cameras, then
shoot it again and how James Franco would have to re-act that scene
over and over and over.

Once you know all that, the movies, even the simplest movies, become that much more phenomenal.

Well,
if that's tricky, how about all the little stuff that goes into writing
even a short story? Not just coming up with the plot. Anyone can come
up with a plot. Guy takes his life
savings of $200,000 from his retirement account so that he can fly out
to Hollywood and convince people he's a producer, which he does because
he wants to meet a new pop starlet and try to convince her to marry
him, so his plan to do that is cast her in the fake movie he's
pretending to make using the life savings he took out without his wife
knowing.

I just came up with that just this second; never
thought of it before but it's a book I'd maybe think about writing.
(After I get through the ones I'm working on and after I get through
the next ones I want to work on and after John Tyler: Space President for Hire gets published, of course).

But as an author, sit down to write I'm In Love With Angel Diamond (And My Wife Doesn't Know It)
(the title I just now invented for the book I invented a few moments
ago) and look at that first blank page and begin to confront the
problems of actually writing it, and you see just how hard it is to throw together a book.

In
the first place, what are the character's names? I came up with "Angel
Diamond" because it seems like exactly the lame kind of fake name a
singer might take if it was produced by someone who cynically wanted to
package a singer to sell to tweens. (It's also the kind of dumb rock-star name that frequently ends up in books and seems so lame when
you read it, so maybe it would work fine for my book, which I'm now
much more interested in writing and might just move up ahead of John Tyler on the list of projects.) But what's "guy who takes out the money's" name?

Where does he live? What's his wife's name? Who's telling the story? When is it set?

Once
you get past all of that, all important, there's the matter of creating
the world these people live in. How realistic is that world? I'm
reading A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon right now, and a character in it is renting videos, videos that actually exist (like Volcano) but he's renting… videos, which makes the book seem kind of dated already because who rents videos?

In A Spot of Bother,
the use of real movies as props for fictional characters works pretty
well, because the story needs to be rooted in the real world even
though it's fiction; the main focus of the book (which is very good) is
George's discovery of a spot on his body that he assumes to be cancer,
and the resulting chaos that causes in him as the rest of his family
experiences their own chaos while a wedding is pending. (I'm halfway
through the book, by the way, and it's excellent.)

The use of fictional
things as props is more problematic, and comes up a lot more often. I'm
writing a story right now in which the characters go to bars and
restaurants and a jewelry shop and other places. For at least some of
those things, I have to come up with names for the place they're going.
I have to come up with the names of businesses they shop at, television
shows they watch (unless I want to seem dated, maybe, if my characters
are watching Gary Unmarried in my book and it comes out in two years and people say "Watching what, now?") and keep doing that, creating fictional item after fictional item. Is my character buying salad dressing? Is it Newman's Own? Or is it Angel Diamond's Ranch Dressing?
Is it important at all that the salad dressing have a name? You tell
me; you're the reader. One of my characters went into a grocery store
and I named that, but I didn't name the kind of apples she fell onto with William Howard Taft and her son. (It's kind of a complicated story.)

The
problem is even worse when your character, or one of your characters,
is somebody creative — a rock star or author or playwrite or someone
– because then you've got to come up with things for that person to
have written or sung or appeared in or something, and unless you're
character is also a real-life person, then your character hasn't
appeared in Top Gun, so if your movie star character is in a big hit movie, then your movie star character probably acted in Wings Of Fire, or maybe the domestic comedy Damaged Goods! (Don't google them; I just made them up. But they're pretty good, aren't they? You could totally picture a sitcom called Damaged Goods!,
about a guy whose wife dumps him and leaves him with their three young
kids and no money so he starts up an online store selling things he
finds around town that he then sculpts into art? I imagine Ricky
Gervais would be perfect for the lead role.)

(Also, I'm putting that one into my idea book, too.)

Which
leads me to books that never existed, but should have. Authors should
really have an edge on things like this, shouldn't they? Authors should
be able to come up with titles and storylines and books for their
characters to read and write because authors, every author I've ever
known, is brimming with ideas, has ideas just spilling out and ready to
go, and the authors can then dump some of those into their books for
their characters to write and even then go write those books themselves, in some cases, like John Irving did.

John Irving is a master
at creating fictional books that sound like books you'd really want to
read — probably because he's had so much practice at it. Many of his
characters are creative people — writers or script readers or movie
stars — and so they have to have books and movies and scripts to write
and read and act out.

Take just "The World According To Garp," in which several of the characters are writers. In that book, Irving invented at least 8 fictional stories or books, ranging from the autobiography of Jenny Fields to The World According to Bensenhaver (by Garp). He even wrote
an entire fictional story — which raises the question about whether a
fictional story is fictional if in fact the entire story exists,
as "The Pension Grillparzer" does, a story which is (fictionally)
supposed to have been written by T.S. Garp but which actually exists,
and was written by John Irving, making it not a "fictional" story anymore, right? Because it was actually written and you can read it?

(And if you think that's confusing, consider "There And Back Again," by Bilbo Baggins, the book Bilbo was always working on writing in The Lord of The Rings… but wasn't "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien subtitled "There and Back Again?" Yes, it was. Which means that the book "The Hobbit" was the real version of the fictional book Bilbo Baggins would later work
on writing while he lived through the events that took place after, but
which were set up by, the events that took place in the book Bilbo
Baggins was writing about…)

Great. Now I'm dizzy.

John Irving didn't stop with just the Garp fictional
books; he had other fictional books created by other fictional
characters, and so did other authors, including J.K. Rowling's (who
presumably will not sue me for my audacity in talking about her
writing) creation of books like The Tales of Beedle The Bard
which then also became real, too (showing, again, that authors have
these ideas that they just want to get out and create) and even
fictional books invented by fictional people, like the books "Lemony
Snicket" wrote (including "The Big Peruvian Book of Small Peruvian Snakes")
and Kurt Vonnegut, who invented an alter-ego writer in Kilgore Trout
and then had that writer write a series of books that were distinctly
Vonnegutian…

… and the list goes on and on, and oftentimes, like my own John Tyler: Space President For Hire or the Angel Diamond book, I'll be reading a book and a fictional book will come up and I'll think I would really like to read that book, too. And then I wish that I could read that book, and it makes me a little sad that I never, probably, will read that
book, just like I get a little sad when I first go into a bookstore or
library and see book after book after book and realize that I'll never,
in my life, read even a tiny fraction of all the books I would like to
read.

I mean, how could you not want to read "Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension," by Kilgore Trout, or "Eight Solid Light-years of Lead" by John Jose Fahey? Just the titles scream out to be read.

But
above all of those fictional books stands the one single book that I
most regret doesn't exist, the book that I would gladly fund research
into discovering whether the hypothetical 10 other dimensions that may or may not exist actually do exist, on the theory that if there are 10 other dimensions, then in one of them, this book may exist:

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

I can actually see
that book, invented by Douglas Adams in his series beginning with the
book of the same name, in my mind — something like a Kindle, which
probably got the idea from the Guide, with the "Don't Panic" right on the cover and the buttons and the sub-etha updates and the screen.

And I want so badly to be able to pull out the Guide when I'm bored or questioning something, to have a pocket-sized Google with a sense of humor and style, to look up Babel Fish or Magrathea
or something else, whatever pops into my head, to see what it says
about everything and anything and have most of it not make sense but
some of it make more sense than it should, and have the things that don't make sense actually make sense because it turns out we're not living in our world but in the world of the Guide… and to read things like this:

A
towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an
interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value -
you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold
moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded
beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep
under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of
Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth;
wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward
off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't
see it, it can't see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can
wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry
yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More
importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason,
if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has
his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in
possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask,
compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit
etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch
hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might
accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who
can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it,
struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Through all of
Douglas Adams' books, while I was captivated by the humor and ideas and
characters and adventures that seemed both slapped together and
carefully plotted out, simultaneously, somehow, over all of that arched
this thought, over and over and over: I wish I could read the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy,
the actual book. Entries like the towel entry and the other made-up
things Adams threw into his books made me long not just to read the
Guide, but to have the Guide be describing the world I lived in instead
of the world his characters lived in.

Which is as good a place as any to finish up October is Book Month:
I began by talking about the worlds we create reading about the worlds
authors create, and I can finish by talking about the worlds we wished
authors would create for us to go live in, worlds that are described
and hinted at and touched on in the fictional books the authors create
for their fictional characters to read and write and make into
movies… or the fictional books the authors create to describe the
fictional worlds they've created to the fictional characters that live
in the worlds created by the authors… books like The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, the The Best Book That Never Actually Existed (But Should)

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

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Children
tormented by demons. An old man accidentally killing people. Witches
who live hundreds of years and escape from Hell repeatedly. An
astronaut drifting through space… these and other great stories can
be found only on AfterDark: The scariest things, you CAN'T imagine.

The Best Of Everything: Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours!

During that breakfast, my mother-in-law relayed to me that she had recently received a bill for her “treatments,” a procedure she gets every month at the hospital. The bill was for $750, for two months worth of treatments; the bill was her 20% of the cost of the monthly treatments, which she says “keep her alive.”

After that breakfast, in the afternoon, when I called my dad back, I learned that he had just been diagnosed with, in his words, “corporate tunnel syndrome,” a development that he believed stemmed from a wrist injury he suffered at work and the physical therapy he’s been going through.

Both my mother-in-law and my dad asked me, specifically, to look into their situations because I’m a lawyer, and they were concerned; mother-in-law was concerned about how she and my father-in-law were going to afford to pay $375 per month, on top of their other bills, and thought that their insurance should be covering these charges. Dad was concerned about how he’d pay for his surgery to cure his “corporate tunnel” — try as I might, I couldn’t get him to call it carpal tunnel — if worker’s compensation didn’t cover it. He wanted to know whether I thought maybe he should be hiring a lawyer to make sure it was covered.

Why, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, do senior citizens think they have to hire a lawyer to force their insurers to pay for necessary medical care?

As I pondered that question this morning, I saw a clip of the McCain speech where he referenced Barack Obama’s ideas on health care and taxation and said they were redistribution of wealth, and I heard, as a senior citizen who doesn’t have to worry about things because he’s rich, as that man-wh0-married-into-inherited wealth spoke about helping the poor, I heard boos.

So before you answer my question — especially those of you who are about to scream “socialism,” especially those of you who booed or were inclined to boo yesterday when Out-of-Touch John McCain, when protect-the-wealthy John McCain, when further-destroy-America John McCain, said the words “redistribute money,” — before you answer my question, consider this:

Seats for the New York Mets new stadium, CitiField — you may recognize the cognomen “Citi” — it’s from Citigroup, a company that bought the naming rights to the stadium but which may continue losing money until 2010 and which either have been or will be bailed out using money that could have paid for health care — seats at CitiField will sell for as much as $495 per ticket per game. But it’s worth it, right, because they get the best sight lines and offer all-inclusive food and drink, so it’s not like you’re spending extra for your hot dogs, right?

Before you answer my original question, which was, again: Why, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, do senior citizens think they have to hire a lawyer to force their insurers to pay for necessary medical care? consider this:

To buy tickets at the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium, football fans will have to first fork over $150,000 for a “personal seat license,” and then pay $340 per ticket per game.

To buy tickets to a Colts game, some people pay $235,000 to rent a “Super Suite,” the key feature of which is that each suite has a 50 inch plasma TV, along with an individual TV screen for each seat — so Colts fans pay $235,000 to go to the stadium and watch the game on TV.

To buy tickets to a Giants or Jets game in 2010, fans will pay $20,000 for a “personal seat license” giving them the right to buy a $700 ticket to the game.

To buy tickets to a baseball game in our nation’s capital, where Continue-To-Destroy-America John McCain has practically lived his life, some Nationals’ fans pay $400,000 per year to rent a “Washington Suite,” which features a porch with a TV and the best views of the park.

It’s not just the superrich, either. The average cost of a major league baseball ticket in 2008, was $25.40 across the league, according to ESPN, with teams averaging between $48.80 per ticket (the Red Sox) down to $15.96 per ticket for Arizona.

The Red Sox’ attendance this year was 3,048,250. So Red Sox fans spent at least $148,754,600 (I say “at least” because those numbers don’t include premium seating and corporate boxes) just on tickets. Just to get into Fenway Park and watch the game, Red Sox fans spent $148,754.600.

Arizona, the club with the lowest ticket price, drew 2,509,924 people this year. Arizona fans paid $40,058,387.04 just to get into their ballpark and watch their team play.

It may be worth it just to get in the door for some people — ballparks and stadiums are increasingly nice and increasingly pricey. Three new stadiums are scheduled to open in 2009 — CitiField, Cowboy Stadium, and Yankee Stadium. The combined cost of just those three new venues is $3.2 billion. Let’s spell that out:

$3,200,000,000 is the combined cost just to build three new sports complexes that will debut in 2009.

Some of the money is private, some is public — but wherever the money theoretically comes from, it actually comes from the pockets of sports fans, because none of those teams (the Mets, the Yankees, and the Cowboys) are losing money and none intend to lose money. If the money to build the stadium is public money (as it was for Miller Park in Milwaukee, where the poor paid a disproportionate share of building a ballpark they can’t afford to get into) it comes directly from you and me and everyone else; if the money is private, it comes indirectly from people who buy Romo jerseys and Yankee caps; corporations do not spend money or make money; they redistribute money from you as you buy products to people who run or own the corporation.

People will say that it is all right that we spend that money on sports, and they will say that because they’ll say it’s private money — people choosing to buy a Jeter jersey — or that the public money is well-spent because it creates jobs. (I’ll talk another day about the jobs such spending creates, but not today.)

But it’s not; it’s not okay, because at the same time as people are doing what they want with their money, they are selfishly hoarding more than they need and selfishly resisting using a tiny portion of their money for the common good. At the same time as people are spending $700 to see a stupid ball game, they are booing Barack Obama when he suggests that the rich could spare some money so that the poor can get health care. And that’s not okay. It’s not okay for any American to spend $700 on a ball game, or even $50 on a ball game, but not want to help the poor.

It’s not okay to have a country that thinks it’s great to spend billions on ballparks and might elect Continue America’s Destruction John McCain so that he can take away insurance coverage from people and which boos the proposition that the rich can help the poor. It’s not okay because we can do better.

I’m going to rephrase my question and ask it one more time:

Why, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, in a country where we can spent three billion dollars to make sure that people can watch a game comfortably, do senior citizens think they have to hire a lawyer to force their insurers to pay for necessary medical care?

Shame on you, America. Shame on you for booing the idea that the rich can help the poor, shame on you for making senior citizens worry about whether they can afford to live without pain, and shame on you for even considering voting for McCain.

The Fix: Increase the highest marginal tax rate to above 50% — the rich can afford it, and the odds are you’re not rich; when you get to be rich, you’ll have an obligation, like the rich are obliged now, to pay your fair share of taxes. Pass real health care reform by providing a national health insurance policy that anyone can buy, a policy that has no lifetime caps on payments, and that provides an increasing premium and copay as the policyholder’s income increases; those making at or near the poverty level would pay nothing; those who buy into the coverage but who earn more would pay more for it. In addition, require all insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, which would help make insurance coverage more competitive by letting those with pre-existing conditions switch carriers.

What You Can Do Until The Fix Is In: Don’t vote for McCain. Seriously. Unless you are John McCain, or are extremely wealthy, voting for McCain is insanely against your interests. And if you are extremely wealthy, it’s still against your interests because what will you do when the economy falls apart further under a McCain/Palin administration? Also, everytime you buy sports memorabilia, sports gear, or go see a game in person, take a dollar and donate it to charity. Here are two to start with:

Christ House: Located in Washington D.C.– maybe even within site of the Nationals Park, but probably without the great sight lines available to season ticket holders– Christ House’s mission is to provide medical care to the homeless. Their administrator earns only $39,580 per year for salary, using the money it’s raised to help over 3,600 homeless people in its 23 years of existence. Learn more about Christ House and find out how to donate.

The Humanitarian Service Project raises money to help seniors and kids through the troubles that poverty causes. Their programs include the “Christmas Offering,” which gives four weeks of food to more than a hundred families every year — plus gives away 12 tons of Christmas gifts to poor families. They also have the “Senior Citizen Project,” which presently helps 115 senior citizens in need by delivering nutritious food each month, along with toiletries and other needed items, and helps them get “wish list” items like microwaves, TVs, and wheelchairs.

So how about that? You could buy that Romo jersey, and then send a couple of bucks to the Humanitarian Service Project so that a senior citizen could watch Romo play, too. And have a meal. Let’s not forget that. They could watch Romo play and get a meal.

Find out more about the Humanitarian Service Project, and how to help.

I say “enough about special teams” because it’s high time I instituted another award and also made a point that I’ve made before but which is driving me nuts more and more.

I proudly proclaim that this blog is not the blog for stats-nerds, and there’s a reason for that: stats are generally boring, and also stats are ALWAYS misunderstood in the world of sports. Every day, if you listen to sports broadcasters, you will hear ridiculous stats, things like “the Bears have lost 122 straight games in Kansas City,” or, worse yet, “starting out 0-3 means you can’t make the playoffs.“ Or stats like “This team is 14-0 when leading by 10 points or more.“

All meaningless. All useless. And all misunderstood.

Here’s the thing about statistics: They tell you as much about what’s going to happen as a photograph of your wedding tells you what 2013 will be like. Statistics are a snapshot of the past; they are a momentary measure of something that happened at a particular time in the past and they do not predict the future.

Nor do statistics affect the outcome of events; statistics tell you the outcome of past events, and do not affect what happens in the future.

Take that “0-3″ stat; it’s often said that starting 0-3 makes it impossible, or virtually so, for a team to go to the Superbowl. But does it? No! No no no no no!

When people say going 0-3 means you’re not going to get to the Superbowl, they are saying 3 losses is too many to overcome to get to a Superbowl. But how many losses have Superbowl winners of the past had? Last year’s Superbowl loser had none; the Superbowl winner had six.

If you can have six losses and still win a Superbowl, going 0-3 doesn’t make it impossible to win a Superbowl, or even more difficult. Saying that, saying that an 0-3 start makes it nearly impossible to win a Superbowl, is to misunderstand stats completely.

What is correct to say is that if a team is so bad that it loses its first 3 games, it is unlikely that team will suddenly become good enough to win a Superbowl that year. Because starting 0-3 is a measure of whether a team is good or bad, and it is the team’s good-ness or bad-osity that determines whether it will go to a Superbowl or not – -not that team’s record, a record that may be misleading because a team may rack up a lot of wins against weak opponents and then bomb out in the playoffs, or a team may play a tough schedule and end up a wild card because its record is lower than others teams, and that team may then storm through the playoffs knocking off teams with a better record, as the Steelers and the Giants have done in recent years.

Which brings up the second point about stats: they are incomplete and so are misleading. Saying a team started 0-3 doesn’t tell you much of anything, because it doesn’t tell you why the team is 0-3. Are they doing badly because, like Seattle, many of their starters have been injured? Are they doing badly because, like Cleveland, Houston, and Arizona, they are mismanaged teams with poor talent? Or are they starting off 0-3 because they played three high-caliber teams in the first three weeks?

0-3 doesn’t really tell you anything, does it? Consider these two scenarios: Your team starts off 0-3 because its first three games were against the two Superbowl teams from last year and the Dallas Cowboys, and it lost those games, each, by a field goal in overtime.

Or, your team started off 0-3, losing to the Cardinals 56-0, the Browns 33-3, and the Raiders 24-7.

Which team would you rather root? Which team, at 0-3, isn’t really that bad off?

See? 0-3 tells you nothing; STATS tell you nothing without context, which is how I got on this kick this morning and why I’m instituting a new award.

I got irritated about stats again because I listened to ESPN while I got ready for work, and I heard Mike Greenberg give this completely useless statistic. He said that Rays’ Pitcher Matt Garza has only given up 7 runs in his 11 wins.

Greenberg then added this completely nonsensical non-analysis of that statistic: When he’s on, he’s great, or something like that.

Leave aside the tautology of “when he’s on he’s great.” (Who isn’t?) Let’s focus on what that statistic — only given up 7 runs in his 11 wins– tells us.

Nothing.

What can you tell me about Matt Garza based on that statistic? Is he good? Is he bad? Is he great? Is he great when he’s on?

You can’t tell me anything about Matt Garza based on that statistic — because you don’t know who he pitched those games against, you don’t know when he pitched them, you don’t know who else played in those games, you don’t know how many runs the Rays scored in those games, and you don’t know how many games Matt Garza has lost.

Let’s try different variations of that statistic, adding in information that I just made up:

In his 11 wins, Garza has given up only 7 runs; but in his 33 losses, he’s given up 6 runs pr game.

In his 11 wins, all coming against the Kansas City Royals, Garza has given up only 7 runs. In all games against other teams, his ERA is 9.2.

In his 11 wins, all in April and May, Garza gave up only 7 runs; since then, he hasn’t won a game.

In his 11 wins, Garza gave up only 7 runs while the Rays jumped out to at least a 5-0 lead in the first inning in each of those games.

See how each of those changes the equation? In any of those possibilities, is Matt Garza anything remotely approaching a good pitcher?

(I don’t mean to pick on Matt Garza, who may or may not be a pretty good pitcher ;while he was 11-9 this year, he’s 19-22 in his career, but he pitched game 7 of the ALCS and got the win. He also has a stupid-looking goatee.)

So Mike Greenberg got me all riled up with a useless statistic followed by empty commentary — which summarizes much of sports broadcasting these days, and which prompted me to create a new award here on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!. Herewith, I give you

The Tripper Harrison Award For Dumb Statistics and Analysis! (“The Trippie!”)

Tripper Harrison, as we all know, was the loveable goof of a camp counselor in Meatballs, who made the single most awe-inspiring speech in all of sports movies. Forget “win one for the gipper” and “let him play” and that moment in [MARKY MARK SPOILERY SPOILER ALERTY ALERT!] Invincible when the coach roughs up Marky Mark and then Marky Mark goes out and makes a tackle; in all of moviedom, there is no more rousing and inspirational moment than this:

I have goosebumps.

As Tripper points out, It just doesn’t matter! which could be said not just about sports statistics, but about most sports “commentary” and analysis these days.

And, having already won a coveted Homer No Function award, Mike Greenberg is a fitting person to be awarded the inaugural Tripper Harrison Award For Dumb Statistics and Analysis!.

Congratulations, Mike! Keep up the good… that is, well, anyway, at least you fill some airtime between commercials!

See other awards I’ve given out:
The First-Ever Scott Norwood Award.

The “Homer No Function” Award Winners:

Marcellus Wiley, for his Superbowl commentary.

John Clayton, for explaining the meaning of “50/50.“

Mike Greenberg, for getting inside Kobe’s head, or someone’s head.

Right:

Right? by brianefp
Design Custom T Shirt On www.Zazzle.com

Did you know a short horror story of mine, Don’t Eat My Face, will appear in the upcoming anthology “Harvest Hill,” available next fall from Graveside Tales? Go to their site to find out more and order your copy! And don’t forget to read my other horror stories on AfterDark.

Go there now and see the rest of the great sports analysis and hilarious and unique articles!

October Is Book Month continues!

Note the actual title of this nomination. It’s not The Best Scary Book, it’s The Best Book That Really Was Scary.

When I watch horror movies (hang with me; I’ll get back to books in a second) I have a couple of rules: Lights have to be off. No stopping the movie for any reason. And I don’t leave the movie, at all.

I started those rules because I tried to watch The Exorcist on regular TV, with commercial interruptions, while the kids were home. And it was not scary at all. Nothing says “Don’t be scared” more than a Tide commercial.

I also tested those rules, with Oldest. When I told her that The Amityville Horror was the scariest movie I’d ever seen, she doubted me, so we watched it and I made her watch it my way — no lights, no bathroom breaks. And she was scared, even though the special effects in that movie are essentially some Christmas lights and chocolate syrup.

I watch horror movies that way because horror movies require, to really scare a person, that the person not break the spell. More than special effects, horror movies are about getting your mind absorbed in the story and the feeling and the mood, and anything that breaks that feeling and mood causes a re-set of the whole process. So seeing flashes of scary images and a little girl crabwalking down the stairs, and then suddenly cutting to teenagers with drools of cheese wanging around while a 1980s modern rock song plays, and then back to the crabwalking, equals not scary.

Which is, in a nutshell, the problem with scary books, something I struggle with all the time because I like to write horror stories. Books need to be read, which means that a light needs to be on. And books are read while sitting on a couch, or on the bus, or an airplane, or at the kitchen table. And, books are (for the most part) not read in one sitting, so by definition you break the spell the author puts on you.

That, I think, is why some excellent horror stories, while being excellent, aren’t as scary as movies and even TV shows — because the spell gets broken. If I read Heart Shaped Box, a horror story I’d give a 7 out of 10 to, it’s got some scary scenes and a great premise and it’s interesting and well-written and moves right along, but it took me two weeks to read it and in between reading scary scenes, I was giving the twins a bath and having them get excited by the “Supercold” water and I was going to the office to “work” and so I had to keep getting in and out of the mindset that’s required to be scary. Whereas, if I watch a one hour episode of “Masters of Horror” and don’t interrupt it and watch a girl battle off some kind of ogre-thing in a largely unexplained but still creepy setting, the scares settle in and don’t leave.

That’s too bad, and also very good. It’s too bad that scary books can’t be read in one sitting in the dark, preferably on a windy, blustery, October night when the tree branches are crackling and the leaves are rustling and the moon seems to give off even less light than usual even though it seems larger than usual, too — a Madeleine L’Engle kind of night– too bad because books, as I keep saying, engage your imagination, and everyone knows that there’s nothing more powerful than your own imagination, and if you doubt that for even a second, stay in a stranger’s house in a bad part of town and then listen to the noises the house makes at 2 a.m. — and once you hear the noises, imagine for just one second that the noises are a pack of demons breaking into the house to come get you. Then come back and tell me your imagination isn’t better than any special effects better. After you get defibrillated.

It’s very good, though, that scary books can’t be read in one sitting because people still try to write scary books and writing scary books requires doing more than having some water dripping from the ceiling in a New York apartment building or a little girl getting sucked into her TV; writing a book that really scares the reader requires getting under the reader’s skin and into their mind and then knocking some things around; it requires that the writer do the equivalent of those 2 a.m. sounds-and-wonderings, and that’s tough to do.

So tough that I can only think of one book that ever did it successfully — a book that I’m still scared of, today, 18 years later.

A quick aside: This is not to say that there are not other great horror books out there, books that have scary moments and books that are creepy and books that are well worth reading — Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz and A Good And Happy Child by Justin Evans are two that spring to mind right away — it’s just to say that only one book really and truly and actually scared me and still does.

That book was Stephen King’s The Stand.

I’m creeped out just thinking of it right now, and it’s broad daylight outside.

In 1990, I lived in an apartment with a high school friend and worked at a Subway shop while taking a semester (okay, four semesters) off from college. One Sunday night, I came back from a day of making turkey & bacon subs and watched some TV and then got bored but I wasn’t tired, and I had no money plus, it was Sunday night and all my friends had classes the next day. But I had nothing new to read, so I borrowed the book The Stand from my roommate, who wasn’t home to keep me from borrowing it, and began reading it at about 8:00 at night.

I didn’t stop until about 3:00 a.m. and even then I only stopped because I had to be at work at 9 a.m. the next day. (No, I don’t know why it was necessary to open a sandwich shop at 9 a.m., either.)

I went to work and worked that day and came home and began reading again, and I did that each day for the next three days, four days total to read over a thousand pages, but I couldn’t stop.

And, equally important, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

From the first line — Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston — to the [SPOILER ALERT!] last line — Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.– I was hypnotized by it.

I couldn’t shake it off. The story, if you don’t know, has to do with a virus that gets accidentally unleashed and kills off pretty much everybody in the world, except a few who are immune to it. Those few wander through what’s left of the world, slowly gathering in one of two locations: some are drawn to the side of good, and some to the side of evil, as they try to recreate society according to the vision of their respective leaders.

Evil is embodied, in The Stand, by “the Walkin’ Dude,” possibly the greatest bad guy ever if only because Walkin’ Dude still sometimes haunts me like this: people will say “Walking” and for a moment, every now and then, the words Walkin Dude pop into my mind and I get a little chilled. (Walkin’ Dude had a name, Randall Flagg, but I prefer Walkin’ Dude because it manages to be creepily 70s-ish).

Other words that can do that include Trashcan because of Trashcan Man, and references to Boulder, Colorado — where much of the book takes place.

Those words stayed with me, those feelings stayed with me, for 18 years, just as they stayed with me the entire time I was reading The Stand — a feeling not just of being scared, which was in there, but a feeling of being morbidly depressed and saddened and fearful; The Stand, in the best possible way, seeped into my skin and became a part of me. At work, walking to and from work, eating dinner or lunch, in the back of my mind all the time was a feeling of … despair.

When I finished reading The Stand, it took a few days to shake off that feeling, and I never quite totally did it — as you can tell, because it still is freaky to me, the story and the feelings and the images and the ending and the whole process.

There is very little of the jump-out-and-go-boo! in The Stand; horror books rarely work that way because they can’t; there are, in fact, very few creepy or scary images altogether (although the ones that are there, like the walk through Lincoln Tunnel, are seriously scary). What is scary about The Stand is what Stephen King does so well in so much of his writing — the deeper level of scare, the psychological torment that people go through, the slowly-setting-in, numbing horror of just how bad things are.

Other Stephen King works (the movie The Mist springs to mind immediately) do this, too, but The Stand did it better, and what The Stand did better is this: The surface horrors — corpses and evil guys walkin’ around and shootings and stuff — lay over the underlying, more terrifying threats, like a rotting frosting over a decrepit cake: Look at the outside, and it’s gross and disgusting, but cut a piece out and it’ll haunt you forever. So while reading The Stand and getting creeped out and rooting for the good guys to please win, all the while, the beneath-the-surface problems and facts are slowly sinking in: there’s nobody left. 99.4% of the human race is dead. There is evil walking the earth. Could I survive in this? What if they didn’t let me into Boulder? Would I want to survive in this?

It sure made working in a sub shop seem a lot more tolerable.

That’s what it takes to make a book scary; not just conjuring up a ghost or a vampire or some demon… it has to make your mind begin working and working and working, churning things over and mulling them and then the more it does that, the more your mind wants to go back and work on the problem and try to make it turn out good but the more it does not turn out good, and the problem has to be something that could affect you in real life, where you will never actually meet a woman who eats people in order to trick the demons into sparing her soul, but you might meet people who want to kill you because you don’t believe in their way of life, and you might meet people who would betray you because they thought they loved you and found out you didn’t love them, and you might meet those people — it’s possible — after 99.4% of the rest of the world has died.

The plot of the book is too sprawling, the characters too complex and numerous, to really spell out in detail… and that’s a shame, too, because to say “Creepy end-of-the-world/good-vs.-evil book” doesn’t do it justice.

What does do The Stand justice is to say that if you read it, you will never forget it and it will forever creep you out. That’s excellent, and that’s what makes The Stand The Best Book That Really Was Scary.

Here on TBOE,
October is Book Month!

The Best Book I Want To Re-Read Over And Over Again!

The Best Book To Teach Kids That Monsters, and Books, Are Nothing To Be Afraid Of.

The Best Book To Read If You Were A Kid Who Pretended To Be A Superhero.

The Best Song That Is About Writing, or Being In, A Book.

The Best Book That I Think of When I Think of The Words “The Best Book.“

The Best Author I Have Exactly 39 Reasons For Liking

“That’s crazy,” I told him. Octopus or not, he had to be wrong. “I don’t know how to do that.”

Nevertheless, it is within your capabilities.

“How do you know that? How do you know what I can do?” What was it Reverend Tommy had said, about moving freely I wondered, but Samson, Mr. Damned Soul, interrupted.

“I hear voices,” he growled. He still stunk like sulfur and corpse. “We’d better get moving. If this is Doc’s plan, then you can do it, so get to it.” He glared at me. Maybe it wasn’t glaring; maybe that was just the way eyes looked when you’d been in Hell for a long time and then came back as a stinky corpse guy.

Brigitte took my hand. “If Doc says so,” she said, and didn’t have to finish the sentence.

I thought about it. I didn’t know how to go about beginning to do it. I wondered if I should concentrate, or clap my hands, or spin, or just maybe say a magic word or something. I tried to picture Hell, and then I stopped trying because I didn’t want to go there.

“Doc, does it have to be Hell?” I asked.

“Hurry,” said Samson. There were definite noises of footsteps and horses’ hooves and people yelling about who went what way and what way others should take and how they should spread out and I heard the words shoot to kill.

It can be to any world you can travel to, said Doc.

But I didn’t know what worlds I could travel to. I guessed it had to be Hell. What other worlds were there? Just Heaven, I guessed, and I wasn’t sure I could get us all in there.

I squinched my eyes shut real tight and thought, as hard as I could, about Hell and the places I’d been and the people I’d met there… and then felt guilty about Ivanka and tried to not picture her but the best I could do was not picture her naked and then that came into my mind, too, and I was getting distracted and the voices were coming closer and there was more shouts of what to do when they found us and none of it was good and then I heard there they are and I popped open my eyes.

“I can’t do it,” I said to Doc. I looked at Brigitte and said “I’m sorry. I never went there on purpose. It just happened when I fell asleep or was knocked out that time, so I don’t know how to get there…” but I stopped because two things happened.

First, a group of people burst through the trees and said “Stop! Put your hands up!” and second, Samson said:

“It happens when you’re knocked out?” and he grabbed Brigitte and the naked girl and pushed them towards me with one hand, and shot me with the ray gun in the other and before I could even try to protest, as Brigitte and the naked girl smashed into me and I started to fall, I felt the ray gun hitting me, and it was hot and crackly all over my body, like I was wrapped in bubble wrap that was all popping only the bubbles weren’t filled with air but were filled with hot water, and then everything went black

Meanwhile, In New York:

He worked carefully and slowly throughout the night, looking frequently at the specifications. He knew he would not finish the order tonight and because of that he paced himself and worked a little more slowly than he usually would. It would not matter; he was ahead of schedule on this order, anyway, and because he had slowed his pace and had the time, the craftsmanship would be better and he could select the parts with a greater eye towards detail, towards assembling the whole.

Making zombies could be an art.

Or it could be a business.

He tried to make it an art while also having it be a business. He wanted to make money at this, why else would he do it, but he wanted his customers to appreciate the zombies he made, the creations he came up with, the eye for detail and the little touches, like the fact that most of the sewing was done inside the skin, resulting in less-visible stitching and cleaner seams.

There were plenty of people who tried to make zombies and what they made were awful patchwork corpses that were kept alive by implanted small Constant Rescusitators, corpses that required constant attention from people who were basically more plumber than creator or doctor.

There were a select few who could make actual zombies, zombies that did not require mechanical intervention to move and act lifelike in some fashion, zombies that could follow basic commands and perform rote activities, like cleaning or having sex with each other or with their master. Those zombies, though, were problematic in that they generally were dumb machines and would follow the orders of anyone who happened to command them, even other zombies (although it was rare that zombies of that order could talk.)

He was, so far as he knew, the only one who made actual zombies that could walk and talk and interact and which were hardly distinguishable from a human being, zombies that moved among the human populace and did not draw much attention, but zombies that would nonetheless do what zombies were supposed to do, which was to follow orders given them by their master.

He did not love the business, or hate it. He had taken it up because it was a way for someone who otherwise lacked much in the way of marketable skills or imagination to make money, enough money that his front, a diner, did not occupy much of his time anymore.

The diner he had inherited from his mother and father, a business they had run and which they had hoped their son would not only carry on but would expand; they envisioned a chain of diners across the country, headed by their wealthy son who would travel the country touring them in fine suits, renting three or four cars of the train or perhaps traveling in his own dirigible. But he had neither the inclination nor the business acumen to run the diner itself, let alone make it more successful than it had been, and it had fallen onto hard times and existed only as a means of testing his creations, his zombies, and to explain where he got his income, income he was careful to hide and keep quiet as best he could, he had been taught how to do that. He would not have the diner at all but he needed a testing ground and he needed some visible means of support because in this era of instant sharing and access to all information, having money and no support might attract the attention of the government, such as it was and he wanted no attention like that.

He had learned how to make zombies from an Army Lieutenant who knew how the military had done it, who knew how the military used to plan to use zombies as soldiers but had decided that they were not much better than regular men and women as soldiers; they followed orders better and were harder to stop, but were limited in their capacity to think and react without orders and required a great deal of time and energy to make.

Most military zombies, the Lieutenant had told him, were used now for suicide missions, and as pleasure companions for real soldiers, who either did not know or did not care who they were having sex with.

The Lieutenant had taught him how to make zombies, how to craft them so finely that they were almost people. The Lieutenant had been unfamiliar with chips, which were only coming into vogue those years ago, and so he had needed to figure that out for himself.

He’d also needed to figure out for himself why it was important to not leave a half-finished zombie laying around, which was why he worked slowly tonight. One couldn’t finish up too much of the zombie and then leave it sit. Either finish it all, or only get through about one-third, he’d developed as a rule of thumb.

He’d developed that rule at the same time he’d come to the realization that a torso with arms but no head or no legs, pulling itself around on the streets of New York City, was bound to raise questions.

Begin the story from the beginning by clicking here!

Then, I read in Entertainment Weekly, that there are currently six shows filming in one of the boroughs of New York City, and that it costs an average of $3 million dollars per episode to film in New York City. Those shows film there for various reasons, including (in the case of “Life on Mars,”) that Brooklyn can look like Boston but has wider streets, and including for realism.

Six shows. Most regular series have 22 episodes per year, so that means that the cost of filming those six television shows, alone, $396 million. It always looks more impressive with the zeroes, so here goes:

$396,000,000 is what the United States can afford to make Life on Mars and Ugly Betty more realistic.

I also like to break it down to the basic units, so here goes that:

We spend $1,084,931.50 per day to make sure that when Brooke Shields goes shopping on Lipstick Jungle, viewers will see real New York stores behind her.

We spend $45,205.47 per hour to make sure that Fringe‘s outlandish plots are adequately grounded in the gritty streets of New York City.

We spend $753 per minute in order to keep the Gossip Girls gossiping in stylish locations.

We spend $12 per second, every second of every minute of every hour of every day filming just six TV shows in New York City.

It took you two seconds to read that sentence. That’s $24 America just spent filming six tv shows.

That’s just the very tip of the iceberg. In years past, statistics suggested that it costs $1.3 million per episode, total, to film a sitcom — more if the stars are paid a lot. The book Entertainment Industry Economics by Harold L. Vogel said that the cheapest programs to produce were daytime soaps, at $125,000 per hour.

So that gives us costs of $125,000 per hour to $3,000,000 per hour, roughly speaking, for each new show on TV. Let’s use the $125,000 per hour figure just to give us an estimate. Let’s assume that each hour of new TV programming costs $125,000 per hour for daytime soaps and primetime TV.

If I leave out basic cable — for which people pay, so it’s not purely advertiser supported, which is important for reasons I’ll get to in a moment — and leave out reruns and assume 2 hours of daytime soaps per day on the ‘big 3′ networks, and if I assume no new programming in the 13 weeks of summer, it works out like this:

Daytime soaps: $250,000 per network per day, five days a week, 39 weeks per year = $48,750,000 per year on soap operas alone.

Nighttime TV: Three hours per night, four networks, equals $375,000 per night per network, or $1,500,000 per night for all networks. They spend that seven nights per week at a minimum cost of $10,500,000 per week, for 39 weeks, for a minimum of $409,500,000 per year on prime time TV programming.

In other words, using the most minimal estimates possible, we spend $458,250,000 per year on new TV shows. It’s probably more, but using the bare minimum America spends at least that on TV shows per year. (At the $3 million per episode cost, America spends $10,998,000,000 per year on TV shows.)

Now, here’s why I used only broadcast TV: Broadcast TV costs you nothing. It is entirely advertiser-supported. The networks spend at least $458 million per year on TV shows and they get zero dollars from you for that; it all comes from Charmin and Sonic and McCain ads and the rest of the commercials you (but not me) complain about.

So where do Charmin and Sonic and McCain get that money? From you. You buy Sonic burgers for the whole family, like I did on my last vacation, because you saw those cool Sonic ads on TV and so you made sure to go there on vacation. You can’t help squeezing the Charmin. You go see Beverly Hills Chihuahua because you saw an ad on TV, and you think that Barack Obama is an Arab because you saw an ad on TV.

If Charmin and Sonic and McCain were not getting money from you — and more money than they spent on advertising — they would not advertise and TV would not be free.

So you, America, spend at least $458,000,000 on new TV shows, each year. It’s probably more; it may be as much as twenty-four times that amount. But you spend at least $458,000,000 on new TV shows.

In light of that, let’s re-examine Newsweek’s contention that there simply won’t be money to pay for ambitious social programs, shall we? Let’s ask ourselves, as a country, why it’s okay for us to spend $458,000,000 watching Charlie Sheen make boob jokes but it’s simply unimaginable that we could spend $458,000,000 to fix the roads, or institute a health care policy that will actually provide coverage for people so that nobody needs to raise money to pay for an organ transplant, or to effectively police our food and drink so that we don’t have to have melamine in pet food and children’s candy, or to institute actual financial reform to have regulators oversee banks making risky loans and securitizing them to pass the losses onto the taxpayer?

What kind of country can spend at least $458,000,000 watching TV but is going to tell the next president there’s no money to do anything to improve the country? Shame on America for being willing to spend money watching fake privileged kids text each other, but not for spending money to make sure that real kids can go visit the doctor.

The Fix: As before, I’ve advocated a sales tax or consumption tax equal to 50% of the value of any goods that cost more than $500; and as before, I’m advocating increasing the highest marginal tax rate to 50% or more.

What you can do until the Fix is In: Every hour of TV you watch, take $5 and put it in a jar. Once a week, send it to a charity that does something valuable for society or a person who needs it more than you do. Here are three to begin with:

Ryan and Angie Shaw and their twins, McHale and Mateo: Insurance companies won’t pay for Mateo and McHale’s medical bills, because these twins who were given a 5% chance of survival at birth (and who are surviving quite well, thanks, at nearly 3) have had so many surgeries they’ve maxed out their coverage. Society decided that it would rather watch Survivor: Whereever they Are Now than let two little boys get medical care; you can fix that by sending tax-deductible donations to the trust fund that helps pay for their care; send them to the Mateo and McHale Shaw Irrevocable SNT, c/o Kohler Credit Union, 850 Woodlake Road, Kohler, WI 53044. (Find out more here; once on that page, type mateoandmchale into the box labeled “Visit a Caring Bridge Website.”)

Help a Kid Get His First Book: “Books For Kids” is a New York-tristate-area program that helps set up children’s libraries, promotes literacy, and gives away books — sometimes the first book a kid has ever owned. Local, state, and the federal government don’t make sure that kids read great books; you can, though, by donating money through their website.

Keep Some People Warm: Governmental policies have made fuel more expensive than ever. THAW: The Heat And Warmth Fund accepts donations to help low-income families in Michigan pay their heating bills in the winter; in addition, the group lobbies for longer-term relief through legislation.

On Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! I continued the process of selecting a new Good Luck Charm, throwing up Danielle Fishel, Jeannie, and Rachael Ray for your consideration — and I also mentioned Updated you on the Quest for History!.

On The Best of Everything I continued October Is Book Month with the nomination of The Best Author I Have Exactly 39 Reasons for Liking.

On Rachel, Brigitte, and the naked girl from Hell escaped from the hospital, and, finally, on Thinking The Lions I wrote this:

He’s a Madman With An Evil Slide:

If you get a Christmas card from us this year, then I have this to say to you: I’m sorry. And I also have this to say to you: Now you have photographic proof that pretty much everything I say about our household is true.

I’m not sure who, exactly, is getting Christmas cards from us. I don’t know anymore who Sweetie and I are friends with. I don’t even know if we really have friends at all. I think we do; we must, if we’re sending them Christmas cards.

The only friends I can think of, offhand, are the friends that we see once every year or so; they’re such good friends that we’ve seen them twice this year, which makes it a big social year for us. But one of those times was to go to Sweetie’s high school reunion, where I spent much of the time sitting quietly and reflecting how much the guy Sweetie dated for a week in high school looked like Chris Farley in those “Motivational Speaker” skits, only sweatier and smelling more like old grass clippings than you would imagine anyone should at their high school reunion. So that doesn’t really count as a social event, does it? Also, what was Sweetie thinking in high school?

But we must have friends, outside of those two, because Sweetie is getting 40 Christmas Cards made up. When she told me that, I tried to think if I knew forty people, period, let alone 40 people that I’d want to go to the trouble of sending a Christmas card too. The answers are no and no. I don’t know anybody who I’d go to the trouble of sending Christmas cards to. I sent Christmas cards out just once; I bought a package of them at Walgreens and got my addresses and spent a Sunday afternoon watching football and doing Christmas cards, and midway through that I thought Now, what the heck is this all about? and I was going to quit but I didn’t want to waste the $6 I’d spent on cards, so I soldiered on through — I’m brave that way– and finished them up and then never did it again.

I’ve found that for many social things, if you just ask yourself Why am I doing this? the answer is frequently I don’t know and then the next question is If I don’t know why I’m doing this, why am I doing this at all, instead of watching ‘Invader Zim’ or playing Cloverfield with the boys? and the answer to that is to stop doing what you’re doing and go watch Invader Zim or play Cloverfield. This tactic doesn’t just work on social things, either; it will be equally effective against exercise. Try it out: Start jogging, and then say Why am I doing this? You won’t be able to answer the question, so you’ll stop jogging and go back to whatever it is you were doing before. If that doesn’t work immediately, then follow up with this: It’s not like I’m training for the Olympics or anything.

That is the exact method I used to go from being healthy to being, well, me. I used to jog 6 or 7 times per week, 5 or 6 miles at a shot. Then, one day, I said to myself Why am I doing this? I couldn’t answer it, so I kept on tying my shoes and stretching and then I said to myself It’s not like I’m training for the Olympics or anything. So I stopped stretching, threw on a sweatshirt, and went and got a beer with friends. True story — and very inspirational, right?

Cloverfield, by the way — and I know my readers are dying to know this — has slowly mutated into a game that now combines various features of all the previous games and also includes a ripoff of a Sid & Marty Krofft Show, all because Sweetie had the idea of getting Mr F and Mr Bunches a 4-foot-tall slide for their birthday in September, a slide they love; they literally play on it for hours, just sliding. I don’t get it; I don’t know why it remains fun, after the 10th or 20th or 50th ride, but they love it. They line up to go on their slide.

I even use the slide to cheer them up; every morning, I get the boys out of their cribs and get them dressed and bring them downstairs. It being morning and “Bunnytown” not being on the TV yet, they’re usually pretty crabby and don’t want to let me get back to the important stuff I have to do (listening to ESPN radio and eating cereal) and they’ll get mad and start to cry, so I started something I call “Slide The Grumpies Away,” where I pick them up and slide them down their slide and keep doing it until they stop being crabby and start smiling. It usually takes about four times, each. I know it’s a bad day if it takes 5 or more.

“Slide The Grumpies Away” helped “Cloverfield” mutate into a new game. “Cloverfield,” you’ll remember, is the game I play with the boys where I roar and chase them and pick them up and drop them on the couch and yell “Cloverfield.” With the slide, new elements were introduced into the game because Mr Bunches, especially, likes to get away from Cloverfield-The-Monster by climbing up the slide and then sliding away at the last instant, so that the monster has to chase him around the slide. But that made Mr F feel that he wasn’t getting an equal amount of Cloverfielding because Mr Bunches was getting chased longer, so to equalize things, I invented “Dr. Slider,” an evil mad scientist who grabs kids and puts them on his Evil Slide and slides them and then Cloverfield The Monster gets them. To go along with that, I “invented” a song for Dr. Slider:

Doctor Slider, Doctor Slider
He’s a madman with an evil slide.
Doctor Slider, Doctor Slider,
He’s as crazy as you’ll ever find.

It’s sung to the tune of “Dr. Shrinker:“

And I think that as long as I keep it in the house, I’m immune from copyright lawsuits. Also, sometimes Cloverfield The Monster doesn’t give them “Cloverfields,” he gives the boys “The Treatment,” which is just like being cloverfielded but instead of yelling “Cloverfield!” as you drop them on the couch, you swing them and yell “one… two… Treatment!”

“Treatment” technically began its life as a punishment; when the boys play in the living room, they like to grab rocks out of the plant and throw them, and to teach them not to do that, I would pick them up and give them “The Treatment,” swinging them and then dropping them from about 1-2 feet up onto the couch on their backs.

They still grab the rocks. In fact, they grab them more.

All of which may explain why the boys were particularly hard to control when we took them last night to have our annual Christmas card taken; as I said, I don’t send out Christmas cards anymore but I’m led to believe, by Sweetie, that we do in fact send out Christmas cards, and each year we send one out featuring all the kids. Which is how we ended up in the photo department of the local Sears store last night with five kids ranging in age from 21 down to 2, and ranging in temperament from “Why do I have to be here” down to “Maybe if I run really fast and smack into that wall it’ll be fun.“

That was how Mr Bunches spent the time before we were ushered into have photos taken: running really fast and smacking into the wall. I’m sure he’s destined to be a NASA physicist. Mr F divided his time, pre-photo, between playing with the toys and running as fast as he could at me and smacking into me. The older kids occupied themselves by slouching.

Once in the room, we tried to assemble all five kids into some kind of order, which was tough to do because The Boy became preoccupied with the issue of his having homework to do; the only time The Boy is really preoccupied with homework is when you want him to do something like have his picture taken, and as soon as we got into the room The Boy notified us that he had a Spanish test, a Physics test, and also Math homework and Drama homework due the next day. All of which, I’m sure, was assigned that very day. It’s been a long time since I went to high school, but I’m reasonably certain that teachers, now as then, do not assign surprise tests.

I did not, though, say to The Boy Well, since you knew about these pictures all week, and since you knew about the tests all week, perhaps you should have studied LAST night for your Spanish and Physics tests so that tonight would be a relatively lighter load of homework and then you wouldn’t sulk your way through the photos. Because when I do that, The Boy gets all huffy at the thought that he knew the tests were coming and didn’t study, because he definitely didn’t know the tests were coming, which in The Boy’s case is probably true, given that the most common comments on his report card are Needs To Spend Less Time Being Social and Needs To Pay Attention. The Boy may not actually know what classes he’s in, let alone when the tests are.

While The Boy moped about that, Oldest and Middle did their best to appear cooperative by agreeing to hold the boys while not doing much, actually, to hold the boys, and then, when Sweetie or I would say something helpful like Hold the boys, they’d say something helpful like They don’t want me to hold them, and they don’t want to sit still. Which is where I would ordinarily say “The fact that they don’t want to sit still is known to me; that’s why I told you to HOLD them.” Instead, I just kept grabbing boys and putting them back on laps, like a goalie in the weirdest game of soccer ever.

Sweetie, meanwhile, hung back and tried to play safety, keeping those Babies! that got past me from getting out of the room altogether, and occasionally keeping Mr F from chewing on the cords that led to the camera.

Through it all, the highly-trained, very competent photography professional who was there to ensure that our pictures turned out excellent pitched in by complaining to us that she works 60 hours per week, and offering to hire Oldest. She also then left the camera low enough that Mr Bunches could crawl under it, stand up, smack his head, and be effectively done for the evening.

The three oldest kids were still posed and we kept depositing Babies! onto them in the hopes that at some point the highly-trained very competent photography professional would, you know, take a freaking picture but she kept not doing that; she appeared to require several minutes of motionlessness to ready herself for the complicated task of clicking a button, so we did what we could to keep the boys motionless on their siblings’ laps: we gave them cracker-sticks to eat (a snack we’d picked out because it left no smears or crumbs or colors — it’s truly a wonder snack), giving them keys and my business card and a cell phone to play with, giving them sippy cups of milk, jumping up and down, tickling them, making random noises.

All of that did not distract Mr F and Mr Bunches from their mission, which was to be anywhere but in front of the camera and to never stop moving — but it did distract the older kids and make them laugh and move, so that on the rare occasion when the highly-trained very competent photography professional remembered that she was actually working, and snapped a picture, more often than not, the picture featured an older kid not looking at the camera, or standing up, or remembering that the Drama assignment was in fact a lot longer than they’d previously thought it was so could we please hurry this up?

We were there for forty-five minutes or so, during which time we didn’t just wreck the room that we were in; we also wrecked someone else’s family photos, when Mr F escaped from the room and went tearing off into another studio where a pleasant-looking little boy without any crumbs on his face or milk spilt in his hair was sitting quietly and posing nicely for the camera, or doing that until Mr F came tearing in there and waving his arms, gleeful at the thought that he’d escaped, and ran straight toward that other little boy, who looked terrified and cringed back from both Mr F and Mr F’s sweating daddy chasing him.

In the end, we got two photos to choose from, and Sweetie picked the best of those two, selecting that photo which the highly-trained, very competent photography professional described as the one in which Oldest “looks drunk.” But at least she’s looking at the camera; The Boy is, for some reason, looking sharply off to his right, so that you see only the top of his head. Mr F is trying to escape and is lunging away from the pose, while Mr Bunches opted to scowl like a gargoyle.

Middle looks okay, though. And for the first time in years, I’m actually looking forward to sending out the Christmas cards.

I might even send one to myself.

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Children tormented by demons. An old man accidentally killing people. Witches who live hundreds of years and escape from Hell repeatedly. An astronaut drifting through space… these and other great stories can be found only on AfterDark: The scariest things, you CAN’T imagine.

I will begin with this priceless advice, which you should write down: When you are lost on the way home from Chicago and are unclear where you are, don’t just turn left.

That’s what I learned yesterday. I learned other things, too, that may be not as applicable to your life but they’re worth knowing anyway, so I’ll give them to you upfront just so there’s no wondering what the morals of this story might be. The other things I learned, in no particular order are:

1. Check your voice mails before you return a phone call.

B. If you’re the type of person who always wants to be the center of attention and thinks that you can be the center of attention by doing whatever it is you are watching, it’s best not to be a spectator at a marathon.

iii. There are a lot of biker bars in the hinterlands of Illinois.

I learned all of those things yesterday because I went with my nephew to see my nephew’s dad, — the guy I call my brother Matt– run in the Chicago Marathon. I was taking my nephew because he and I live in Wisconsin, and Matt had asked me to take him there; Matt lives in Florida, so it makes perfect sense that he came from Florida to Illinois to run in a marathon, and that Nick and I went from Wisconsin to watch him do that.

I only ended up taking Nick because I have a sense of obligation to my family and because I’m slow-witted when I’m tired, and because I did not yet know Moral 1 of this story, from above. In short, I ended up taking Nick because I returned a phone call to Matt without checking my messages first. But I should be excused for not having checked my messages because at that point, I was tired. I was both tired of messages and I was physically tired because the point where I checked my messages was Saturday morning, and I had decided to give Sweetie a break and take care of the boys by myself. A broken lamp, a scrape on the leg, an entirely-shredded-newspaper and a lot of water on the floor (don’t ask) later, I had decided that it was necessary, if Sweetie was really going to get a break, for me to remove Mr F and Mr Bunches from the house entirely, so I took them shopping for Sweetie’s birthday and Sweetest Day presents.

I knew it was time to get a birthday present for Sweetie because she’d emailed me an email titled “Things That I Want For My Birthday.” I knew it was time to get a Sweetest Day present because Sweetie told me last week “I already bought your Sweetest Day present,” which made me wonder, for a second, if that was Sweetest Day, and, if so, how quickly I could convince her that my plan for her for Sweetest Day was to take her out to a surprise dinner despite the fact that (a) we’d already eaten dinner and (b) I was wearing my Buffalo Bill pajamas already.

Luckily, that wasn’t Sweetest Day; Sweetest Day is still some time in the future and I’m ready because now I’ve got the present, set to go, wrapped and everything. So when I get my Sweetest Day present, I’ll be able to give one back and pretend that I knew it was Sweetest Day.

It did not help my mental and physical exhaustion that I hadn’t slept much last week on account of I may have a broken nose from Mr F back in January that has been getting all stuffed up and keeping me awake nights; and it did not help much that by the time I returned the call in question I had already taken many, many calls on the subject of coming to see Matt in the marathon.

Growing up in our household, I should have known: we were raised to believe that if something was worth doing, it was worth making 273 phone calls about. Christmas, birthdays, graduations, visits for an hour, trips to the movies: if we were going to do something, we were going to talk about it incessantly on the phone, first. We were going to call someone to invite them, then call them to confirm that we were inviting them, then take a call to confirm that we’d called to invite them, then call them back to remind them, then take a call to see if they needed to bring anything, then call them back to say that they did not need to, then call to make sure they had the right time, then take a call to see if kind-of-cousin Spencer could come, then call to say that’d be fine, then call to see if kind-of-cousin Spencer was bringing anyone, then call to say we didn’t mean that Spencer couldn’t bring anyone, then take a call to confirm that it was okay if Spencer brought someone, then a call to say that Spencer wasn’t coming after all, and then, on the day of the event, we would make one final call just to see if people were coming.

That, mind you, is the bare minimum of conversations necessary to attend a family event when I was growing up. And I’m not exaggerating. When my dad remarried a while ago, I took four calls from him the day before, ranging from a confirmation of when I’d be arriving to an update on what songs he wanted me to burn to the CD they wanted to play while guests were arriving. Then, I got a call from him as I drove in… “just to talk.”

So although I tried, with Matt’s Chicago Marathon, to show him a better way, I shouldn’t have expected more. After an exchange of emails during the week, he left a message for me and emailed me again on Friday, so I called him and reassured him that I was still coming and that i didn’t know yet whether I’d drive or take the bus and that I would make my plans Saturday and then I’d call him.

In the midst of trying to figure out exactly when Mr F had broken the lamp and what Mr Bunches was crying about, and get them ready to go shopping, Matt had jumped the gun and called me again, leaving a message. I loaded the boys in and hopped into the SUV and started out for the store. To save time, I simply called him back instead of checking the message.

Just so there’s no missing it: Lesson 1. Check your voice mails before you return a phone call.

Had I done that, I would have been prepared when Matt asked if I’d mind bringing Nick down; Nick lives with his mom an hour away from me and is 17 and shouldn’t drive to Chicago himself and all and I was on the phone with Matt as he made that request and I simply couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a reason why I couldn’t do that.

It’s not as though I didn’t want to do it. I mean, I didn’t want to do it, but not because of anything to do with Nick or Matt. It had a lot to do with the fact that it required me to leave a lot earlier if I picked Nick up and go way out of my way, and it had a lot more to do with the fact that I’m not really a people person, and I don’t see Nick more than once every 8 years or so, and Nick is 17 and I wouldn’t have all that much to talk to him about, and it also had a lot to do with the fact that I’d figured, at that point, that since I was going to Chicago by myself I’d bring along my iPod and a book I bought last week and I would find a spot on the route and read for a while and then cheer Matt as he went by and then go back to reading until the race was done, and having set my heart on that being my day, it dismayed me to think that I couldn’t do that because while I don’t see Nick all that often, it would still be rude of me to just sit and read while he was sitting there, being 17 or whatever it is he would be doing.

So I thought as quickly as I could as Mr F and Mr Bunches threw potato chips at each other in the back seat and said “Okay,” and we worked out details of what I would do and I decided to make the best of it. I also decided that Nick and I would listen to my music.

You’d think that’d be the end of it, but there were two more phone calls and four text messages, during which the plan changed again and ultimately Nick ended up driving to my house and we left from there, leaving at 5:00 a.m. and heading out on the road.

Nick is a really good kid, and really smart, and very polite. He dutifully answered all my questions and made small talk with me for about 30 minutes and tried to ignore the old-man music I was playing. The ride was actually going pretty well, I thought, and we were getting along well. It must have been exciting for Nick to talk to his uncle again and take a road trip, because during a 20-second-lull in the conversation, he fell asleep. At least, I think he fell asleep. He may have been pretending in order to not answer any more questions.

To be fair, I’m not really sure how to talk to a 17-year-old. I didn’t know how to talk to 17-year-olds when I was around their age; I was a quiet, shy, nerdy kid who never really got over the way the other kids picked on me and beat me up throughout middle school, so I didn’t interact much with kids. And now that I’ve helped raise kids who were, for a year, 17-year-olds, I’m still not sure how to talk to them. Most of my talking to them is in the form of orders: pick up your room. Set the table. Bring me home one of those “Everything bagels” when you’re done with your shift at Panera Bread. Come listen to this song that was made in the 1980s and which I think is cool but you’ll find lame.

When I try to talk to them beyond giving orders, the conversations tend to go like this exact conversation I had with The Boy this morning.

The Boy: The Packers are in first place.

Me: Yeah, but they’re tied with Minnesota.

The Boy: But who has Minnesota played?

Me: It doesn’t matter; they’re still tied.

The Boy: So you’re telling me that it doesn’t matter if the Badgers play a division II team and win their games there, that’s what you’re saying?

Me: (Confused because I don’t know how the Badgers came in): College football is different.

The Boy: Exactly. (Storms off.)

I think I won that round. So I was at a loss for how to talk to Nick, but we soon found something that would be a regular topic of conversation for most of the day: We were lost, or possibly lost, or going to be lost. On the way to the marathon, I was trying to follow the Mapquest directions but I had trouble doing that because I’d given them to Nick to hold before he fell asleep, and as we neared Chicago he still had them, on his lap, but he was asleep. So I really needed to get the directions but I really also needed to not have my nephew wake up while I was reaching across his lap in his sleep.

I settled for hitting the brakes a little too hard as we came up to a tollway, and he woke up, and I had him look at the directions and figure out what exit we needed, and we came to the consensus that exit 51-I was far past us, since we were at exit 82 and then 83 and then 84. So we instead decided to generally head for downtown Chicago and look for signs that pointed us to the street we were headed for — a street that, as it turns out, was the exact right place to head for because that was the starting line of the Chicago Marathon, but a street also that you could not get to because it was the starting line of the Chicago Marathon.

Just after we decided to use that method of finding our way around, a sign flashed by that exit 51-I was next, proving that we can’t read directions and that numbers in Illinois do not follow the sequence of numbers in the real world. We took that exit, and in moments had parked the car and were making what would be my third cellphone call of the day, to Matt’s wife Kassandra, to figure out a meeting point.

We met up with Kassandra at mile 2 and began the important task of looking for Matt to run by. Matt had a foolproof plan for making sure we’d notice him: He planned on being a 37-year-old white guy in a white shirt running in the marathon. That in fact separated him only from the Kenyans who win every marathon; as far as I could tell, 98% of the people in the race were 37-year-old white guys in a white shirt; the rest were mostly the Kenyans, a guy in an Elvis suit, and a guy who at Mile 13 stopped to talk to people next to us; he was running in the Marathon, running about an 8-minute-mile pace, and he suddenly stopped, chatted with the people next to us, took a sip of water, then said “Well, I’d better get going,” and took off to run the other 13 miles.

I was impressed; I run occasionally, although not as much as I used to. But if I suddenly stopped running to talk to someone, all I’d be saying is medical attention, please and the people had better have a defibrillator with them. Especially if I’d gone 13 miles. I haven’t run 13 miles this month; this guy did it in about an hour and a half, and wasn’t even sweating.

The Marathon was more exciting to watch than I’d thought, though. You can say “50,000 people trying to run 26.2 miles all in one shot through the streets of Chicago” but that doesn’t really give you an idea of the thrill it is to watch. I stood on the sidewalk in my jeans and “Chicago Marathon” t-shirt Kassandra bought for Nick and I, and I was impressed by the runners. We watched them go by the 2-mile mark and pump their fists and smile and people were ringing cowbells and it was very impressive and fun. When Matt went by, we jumped and yelled “Matt! Matt!“ and waved; he finally shot up an arm and looked uncomfortable. I was worried for him; I thought if he looked uncomfortable already, how was he ever going to make it? (I learned later that I was so loud I’d startled him. Sorry, Matt.)

Kassandra had it mapped out for us to find another meeting point near mile 13, by the Sears Tower, so we strolled over there to stake out a spot. We made it there at about 45 minutes into the race, in time to see the Kenyans go jogging by at a 4-minute mile pace that appeared to strain them no more than it would for me to walk to get the mail – it might have been less arduous for them, in fact, since I’m not in the greatest shape these days and there’s a lot of fallen hickory nuts on the way to our mailbox, making navigation tricky.

Once there, we did the main thing you do when watching someone compete in a Marathon: waited. Watching someone compete in a Marathon is tricky; unless they have the runners circle a track, you can’t see them run the whole race. So the organizers try to set up a course that allows spectators to move from point to point without covering the same 26 miles, and if you do that (as we did) you get to the next spot well ahead of the runner you’re following. In this case, it took us 15 minutes to go from mile 2 to mile 13, including stopping to buy a t-shirt and use a restroom. It took Matt 1 hour and 30 minutes to go that same distance.

We spent the time waiting for him trying to figure out where he’d be, and watching the runners, every one of whom was in far better shape than I’ve ever been, and far, far better shape than I was, standing there on the sidelines regretting that I’d forgotten to pick up a bag of BBQ Fritos like I usually do for road trips.

Some runners, though, were in even better shape than others. Some runners were having conversations as they ran – - and keep in mind, as I did, that they were talking as they ran by us on the 13th mile of their run. I tried to picture what they were talking about. Probably what it’s like to be supermen and superwoman. Or, if they were relatives of mine, they were confirming their post-race plans and then confirming the conversation.

Matt ran by us at Mile 13 and was a little better prepared for our greeting this time, and having seen him, we set out to go to Mile 25 1/2, the closest regular people could get to the finish line. For some reason, you have to buy a ticket to see the end of the Chicago Marathon. I don’t know why they won’t let family members watch as people cross the line, or what the thrill is in watching people you don’t know finish 12,317th in the Marathon, but there you go: if you want to watch people actually finish you need a ticket.

If you want to watch people almost finish the Marathon, you camp out at Mile 25 1/2, which it turns out is in the sun and also a mile or so from Mile 13, forcing Nick and Kassandra and I to walk there in the hot sun (it was almost 80 degrees) but we bravely marched on, heedless of the toll it was taking on our body.

Once at that spot, Nick and I thought we might get better seats across the street and told Kassandra we’d check it out. We did, and liked the spots, but Kassandra pointed out that her side of the street was where Matt would be meeting us after he finished the race, so we tried to go back across the street, only to be told by a guy wearing a “Bank of America” orange vest that street-crossing was forbidden.

As the Bank of America Vest Guy told us that, a biker with a box of Dunkin Doughnuts rode past him and crossed the street, but we couldn’t make it past him, and we were unsure, actually, what authority he might have. He didn’t look like a cop, but he did have an orange vest and the Bank of America is a sponsor of the Marathon, so he might have some quasi-police powers. What if we crossed and somehow they figured out which runner we were there to see and then disqualified him? What if Matt was just about to cross the finish line and other guys in orange vests grabbed him and said “uh, uh, buddy- your son and brother illegally crossed the street, so you’re out!“

So we stayed put on our side of the street and saw as Matt went by at Mile 25 1/2, waving to us, and he picked up the pace and finished off the race. Even then, though, we couldn’t cross, so we had to take a long, circuitous route to get around the entire finish line apparatus, where the runners apparently had to get through a gauntlet of medals and silver-tin-foil blankets and bread and gatorade and ice packs and well-wishers before they could go do what they really wanted to do, which was, in Matt’s case, shower and eat as many carbs as possible.

While Matt showered, Nick and I bummed around and, I, thrilled with what I’d seen, watched the other runners finishing and the runners who were finished talking to their families and brandishing their medals and being excited, and it got me so pumped about the whole experience that I began thinking that I, too, should try to run a Marathon — maybe even this Marathon. Focused on the way Matt was talking about how great it was, and remembering watching those runners go by with the eyes of a city on them and everyone cheering and waving them on, I imagined myself training and then next year, coming here with everyone to have them all watch me run.

Lesson B. If you’re the type of person who always wants to be the center of attention and thinks that you can be the center of attention by doing whatever it is you are watching, it’s best not to be a spectator at a marathon.

I luckily made no concrete moves towards that goal before I listened to how Matt had trained for this run, trained by getting up at 4 a.m. every day, and running 10, 15, 20 miles. As I listenend to that, I thought about how my feet were pretty sore from just standing and watching a Marathon, and then I remembered back to Thursday when I’d gone to work out at the club and after jogging for 20 minutes on the treadmill I’d decided that was enough and went home and ate some pizza. Perhaps Marathons are not for me, I figured. Plus, it would interfere with my plans to become a Superbowl-winning quarterback. So I opted not to declare that I, too, would run a Marathon and instead let Matt enjoy the spotlight while I enjoyed the pizza we were eating for lunch.

Nick and I headed out, then, to go back to Wisconsin and let Matt eat more carbs. We got onto what we thought was the same expressway we’d taken into the city, but, then, all highways look more or less like all other highways, especially in Illinois, which bills itself as the Land of Lincoln but which might as well be called the nation’s interchange. We drove along and I listened to the football scores while Nick pretended that my conversation was both coherent and interesting, at least until he fell asleep again.

After a while, I noticed that I-90 didn’t look so much like I-90 anymore. The first clue I had was that the signs that were supposed to read “I-90″ instead read “41.” The second clue that I had was that there were stoplights, and I didn’t recall any stoplights in the middle of an Interstate highway on the way down there.

Not wanting to alarm Nick, I let him snooze for a while while I tried to figure out where I was, and eventually decided that I had to get back on the Interstate, which I did by taking a road marked “I-94,” a road I recognized and which was also, numerically, pretty close to “I-90.”

It was not geographically close to I-90, though, and I soon realized that and also realized that we were heading not towards the northwest and Madison, our goal, but directly North and to Milwaukee, which was not anyone’s destination.

Luckily, I also realized that we were near a theme park, Six Flags Great America, which I knew because we’d gone to it a lot as a kid and had been back as adults about five or seven years ago. I also remembered that the last time I’d gone to that theme park with Sweetie and the kids — which was the time we got almost run over by a semi that crunched into our car– I’d gone home on I-90. So, I reasoned, there must be a way to get to I-90 from the theme park, and I therefore confidently stayed on the road I was on, all the way to Great America and then past it.

I never saw an I-90 sign, though. I didn’t let that worry me, much, because I had two other things in mind: first, if worst came to worst, I could always go to Milwaukee because I knew my way home from there. And, second, I had the secret superpower of logic on my side.

Here’s what logic told me: If I was heading north and needed to head northwest instead, and I knew for sure that there was a road heading northwest, knew it because I had, in fact, taken that road to get to Chicago just 12 hours before, then all I needed to do was turn left, and eventually I would intersect that road and everything would be fine.

So I did that, picking as the road I turned left on a road called “Rosecrans Road.” I picked that because first, it looked like a major road, and, second, the name “Rosecrans” kind of made me think of Rosencrantz, which made me remember Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, a play we read in high school and which I’d enjoyed quite a bit; I remember in particular there was something symbolic about the way they flipped a coin in that play.

Pricless advice: When you are lost on the way home from Chicago and are unclear where you are, don’t just turn left.

also:

Rule iii. There are a lot of biker bars in the hinterlands of Illinois.

You can guess, from Rule iii, what was interspersed between the farms and trees and rivers and lakes that I drove by as Nick slept. I tried to watch for a place to stop for directions, and also watch the compass I have in the car. As long as I’m heading northwest, I reasoned I’m heading to Wisconsin and Madison.

What worried me — aside from the biker bars– was when the road kept persistently heading southwest. I drove along hoping that Nick would keep sleeping so he wouldn’t worry, and hoping that the road would magically turn into a highway heading towards Madison, or at least that I’d find a gas station that appeared friendly and that also seemed like the kind of gas station where you could pull in quick, run in, get directions to Madison, Wisconsin, and then get back out and on the road, all without waking up your nephew.

There’s not a lot of gas stations like that in Illinois. Finally, I carefully got my cellphone out and put in the earpiece and called home. Sweetie answered.

“Yes?” she asked.

“You’ve got to help me,” I said. “I have no idea where I am.” Nick popped awake at that and I can’t be sure but I’m pretty sure he tried the door handle and considered striking out on his own.

With Sweetie’s help on the laptop we got ourselves not back to I-90, but onto a highway I ultimately recognized and took all the way back home, getting home only about 45 minutes later than I would have, otherwise, which wasn’t too bad for me but it was not so great for Nick who had an hour’s drive ahead of him to get to his house.

I offered to let him come in for a bit and get a bite to eat but he declined — probably thinking that I’d get lost on the way into the house– and headed out. I felt sad to see him go, honestly; I’d been so reluctant to pick him up but he was fun to talk to and was polite enough not to fall asleep the instant I began talking, so I didn’t want to see him leave right away. But I went inside, armed with the souvenir t-shirts I’d brought home for Sweetie and the kids, exhausted and happy to be home.

On top of those feelings, I was very proud of Matt, who finished the Chicago Marathon in 4:17, a time that was far, far faster than anything I could have ever done if I were crazy enough to try to run a Marathon. I don’t think I even would have finished the race. I’m not sure, given how things went, that I could have even followed the course.

He’s actually dead center,
just behind the lady in yellow and to the left of the sign full of superheroes.
Congratulations on running a great race, Matt!

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Rachel’s not sure where she came from or what she’s supposed to do, unless she really is trying to take over the world with a little help from her Octopus, a Valkyrie, and her lover Brigitte. Read Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!

Be a grown up about taxes, will you?

That means just shut up and pay them. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to pay more than your fair share. But, like getting up and going to work, like pretending to like green beans so the kids will eat them, like all the things adults do that they don’t really want to do but if adults don’t do them, who will, you have to pay taxes.

Here’s why: You like the stuff the government gives you. It’s that simple. You don’t gripe when the book store makes you pay for your books. You don’t try to weasel out of paying the tab when the bartender serves the mojitos. Nobody ever complains about the cost of an ice cream cone.

But everyone whines about taxes and tries to shift them off – let the corporations pay them — or avoid them by believing that politicians can hand you money and goodies for free.

Here is one thing you should know: Corporations don’t pay taxes. Never have. Never will. Not the small corporation I work for, not Microsoft, not any. I know they file corporate tax returns and those show that they’ve paid taxes, but those taxes get passed directly on to the person that buys the goods or services the corporation is selling. Sometimes they do it overtly, like when a plumber charged me $30 per hour plus a “fuel surcharge.” Sometimes they just charge you more for Windows Vista. So when you say tax the corporations you’re saying charge me more money for my mojitos.

Here’s another thing you should know: when the government gives you something, it has to pay for it with money from someone else. The government doesn’t earn anything. It lives on handouts — taxes you pay, or money from investors buying treasury bills. Those investors are increasingly foreign investors.

In 2007, according to this article which is easy to find and easier to want to ignore, foreigners owned 80% of the US Treasury notes payable in 3-to-10 years. That means that for the next few years, 80% of the money the US government pays back to investors goes to foreigners.

Is that more comforting than paying taxes? You’re still paying them, after all — the government gets the money to ship to foreign investors by taxing you (or by borrowing more money, but that’s for another day.) But the taxes you pay today are increasingly going to pay the money the government borrowed when you didn’t want to pay taxes 3 years ago or 7 years ago or 10 years ago.

Your attitude towards taxes, frankly, is this: I don’t want to pay for the mojito, so I’m going to ask the bartender to make someone else pay for it. And the next one. And the one after that. And eventually, I hope to be dead before I pay the tab and my kids can pay it.

Well, that’s a juvenile attitude. Expecting to get something for free, expecting to get things paid for by other people, postponing the day of reckoning, not dealing with issues, is a juvenile attitude and it is hurting the country. Americans have long passed the point where they could tolerate even the smallest discomfort for the good of the country. Americans don’t want to pay taxes and will resoundingly vote down anyone who does not promise to cut taxes. Forget tax increases; forget promising, as the good President Bush did, no new taxes. Today’s politicians have to promise to lower taxes — lower lower lower or they won’t get listened to at all.

That attitude: give me stuff for free, make someone else pay, postpone any trouble and don’t make me think about bad stuff, is not the attitude that built a cross-country railroad, united the country after the Civil War, fought and won two world wars, and landed a man on the moon.

It is, though, the attitude that demanded that Congress bailout a bunch of companies that probably deserved to go under, the attitude that made Congress borrow another trillion dollars that our kids will have to pay back because America was worried that the price of mojitos might have to be paid in cash, the attitude that just made things immeasurably worse in the future because America didn’t want things to be a little hard in the present.

A few weeks ago, Joe Biden pointed out that it’s a patriotic thing to do to pay taxes:

What happened? Newsweek told him to “shut up about the taxes.” Sarah You Betcha Palin said something in her debate pre-scripted lines about how she didn’t want to pay any more taxes.

Biden was, first of all, suggesting that people making over $250,000 pay more taxes. That would exclude over half the country since if you make over $250,000 you make more than the median income in every single city in the country; put another way, it means that no matter where you live, half the people or more make less than $250,000.

Biden was, second of all, right. Paying taxes is patriotic. Paying taxes is right up there with voting and serving in the armed services and the other duties that our country asks of us from time to time.

But Biden was criticized for being right, because Americans don’t have even the slightest tolerance for anything even remotely inconvenient or painful.

If we can’t bear to pay taxes to pay for the services we want, if we can’t bear to suffer through some economic downturns that are part of the natural cycle, if we can’t tolerate anything difficult or inconvenient or unpleasant, how are we going to win the War on Terror? How are we going to bring democracy to the world? How are we going to land a man on Mars?

It’s time to grow up, America. Adults pay their own bills.

The Fix, and What You Can Do Until The Fix Arrives: The next time you see a politician, tell him or her its okay not to promise cutting taxes. Ask him or her how they’re going to pay for the programs they promise. And tell Sarah Palin to shut the heck up.

You know, if you saw a guy my age — 39 and 5/6 — on the subway, watching “Spider-Man” on his iPod, you’d probably think nothing of it.

If you saw that same guy my age on the subway reading a Spider-Man comic, the odds are you would find that… questionable. Oh, heck, let’s just say it: You’d think he’s a loser.

Why is that? Why are comic books considered to be unacceptable for grown-ups but movies are considered to be okay? And what do you do if you’re an adult and you like superheroes and comics but you don’t want people to look down on you for always reading Groo the Wanderer?

You read Soon I Will Be Invincible, that’s what you do. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman is a book for people who loved and love comics but want to expand their horizons.

I grew up loving comic books; comic books were one of my introductions to the world of reading. As a young kid, I was given comic books by my uncles, who were only a little older than I was, and I read them and read them and read them, read virtually every comic book I could get my hands on. As I grew older, I continued reading comic books, expanding my reading to include indie comics and sci-fi comics and “serious” comics while still including old favorites like Blue Devil and Ambush Bug.

This worried my mom, who could see no good coming of it.

Then, one day, I stopped. I just stopped reading comics. In part, I stopped reading comics simply because I was too old; it felt a little weird, still reading comic books. Even now, when I occasionally go back and thumb through my comic collection and look at old favorites like the giant-sized issue where Superman and Spider-Man first fought and then teamed up to take on Doc Octopus and Lex Luthor, even now it feels a little strange, because I’m a grown-up and grown-ups aren’t supposed to read comic books.

And I think, honestly, that that’s right, that society has it right that grown-ups should not read comics, or at least not read all that many comics. Not because comics are juvenile — plenty of stuff that’s great to read is “juvenile,” in the sense that it’s fun to read and about things that kids tend to like. I read and loved the Harry Potter series, and that’s juvenile. I read the His Dark Materials trilogy, and that’s juvenile. Juvenile doesn’t mean bad; it just means appealing to the kid in us.

No, I think that adults should minimize their comic reading for the real reason I stopped reading comics: It wasn’t because I was too old to read them, but because being old meant that comics became limiting. Comic books, which are books and are therefore great, are also on the one hand a door opening into a vast world of reading for kids, and on the other hand, a narrow tunnel of literature for adults. Remember the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the hallway gets smaller and smaller and smaller? The door on that hallway is comic books. If you’re a kid, you’ll get through that door. If you’re an adult, you’ll wait outside.

As a kid, reading comics engages you in reading without thinking you’re reading; the pictures and word balloons and quick stories help get your mind into reading without making it work so hard. Instead of this:

Green Lantern stared into Sinestro’s eyes. His battered face pulled into a taut line and he grimaced as he spit out the words through teeth gritted against the pain: “Even rookies know a Green Lantern isn’t without fear.” With that, he swung his exhausted arm out, curling his fingers into a fist and pummeling Sinestro with what little strength he had left, pushing his archfoe through the wall of glass and cutting the enemy’s face in a hundred tiny daggers of anger. “A Green Lantern overcomes fear,” he howled, as he did so.

You get this:

See how that’s easier for a kid? A kid who can’t picture what a shattered wall of glass is easily, a kid who may not yet know the word pummeled, a kid whose imagination is just beginning to stretch out and flex its muscles, needs the assistance of comic book to help develop the imagination the way Forrest Gump needed the assistance of his leg braces to develop his speed.

But for an adult, comics work in just the opposite way. As you read the prose above (I wrote that myself after reading the comic page it’s based on), what did you picture? Did it mirror what ended up on the page? And if it didn’t, was yours better than what the artist came up with?

Comics are shortcuts; instead of giving us some pointers and descriptions and allowing us to build the imaginary world the author wants to help us create, comics serve as Cliff’s Notes for the imagination. Green Lantern in the comics is always the Green Lantern the author wants you to see him. There’s no room, when you’re reading a comic, to picture a Green Lantern that’s anything but (in my case) Hal Jordan.

In a comic book, Gollum always looks the way the author wants Gollum to look.

That is why comic books should generally not be adult reading: because adults have imaginations and backgrounds and the wherewithal to fully populate the imaginary world of a book. And all books, fiction or nonfiction, create an imaginary world. When I read Nothing Like It In The World, a fascinating, incredible book about the building of the transcontinental railroad, a book which if you don’t read it in your lifetime your life will be the poorer for it — I had to create the world of that time. I had to picture the salt flats, the workers with hammers, the mountains they dug through, the giant steam engines, creating all of that using nothing more than my imagination and the tools the author gave me.

That’s what adults should do; that’s what a lifetime of reading and thinking and imagining should do; it should equip you to read something and create that world in your mind. Comics, when you’re a kid, help with that process. They give you a little assistance, a leg up. But comics, when you’re an adult, hem you in.

I’m not saying that adults should never read comic books. Any reading is good; reading anything is better than not reading. If you want to read comics, go ahead. I still go re-read some of my old ones. I still read new comics if they promise to be good. I even read the comics in the morning paper. Comics are not bad; but they are not as good as a good book. Comics lie in the limbo between books and paintings, books and movies, books and TV: they use more of your imagination, more brainpower, than any of those other forms of entertainment, but they still serve to present just one vision, just one image, and therefore are more limited than the boundless world of books.

So read comics, sure, but expand out to read more things. That’s where a problem arises, though. If you’re a comic-book-loving, superhero-loving, kid-at-heart-still reader, like me, if you don’t want every single thing you read to be about transcontinental railroads or guys who work lunch trucks in New Jersey, if you miss those old superheroes, what do you do?

Like I said, if that’s the case, you read Soon I Will Be Invincible.

In Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman writes a comic book for grown-ups. The story is told from the perspectives of “actual” superheroes living in a comic book world that’s a lot like our own but also a lot like a world that’s not quite ours: a world where comic book physics rule and people can become superpowered through surgical intervention or the classic “experiment gone bad,” where magic works and cyborgs are created by government agencies.

The book alternates perspectives, telling about half the story from the viewpoint of Doctor Impossible, the supervillain who begins the story imprisoned. The other half of the story is told by Fatale, a cyborg who became a superhero after an accident destroyed half her body. As the story progresses, [GROWN UP COMIC-STYLE LITERARY NOVEL SPOILER ALERT!] Fatale joins a superhero group that is searching for Doctor Impossible, and as they do that, and as they have the requisite fights with bad guys and internecine squabbles and love affairs, Austin Grossman’s genius becomes more and more evident as he fleshes out, and allows the reader to further develop, this world.

The storyline is only half the fun in Soon I Will Be Invincible. The other half comes in making the superheroes realistic — but in a cool way. These are not “real” superheroes in the lame, JLA-Knockoff way of the disappointing Watchmen (I just don’t get the love of that comic. I found it trite and derivative.) These are “real” superheroes, and supervillains, in the sense that when one hero is interrogating Doctor Impossible, the scars and markings of the operation that gave the hero his powers can be seen; Fatale muses on the difficulty of being a cyborg given the extra weight all that metallic gear and computers adds to her body, and help the reader understand how the computer helps her fight. Doctor Impossible has to gather capital to pull off his schemes — pointing out that armies and robots and lairs do not just build themselves.

Grossman also gives his heroes the backstories and hints of other stories to come; some of the heroes are children of other heroes, now retired. One is missing and the others are looking for him. There are the civilian girlfriends and captives and secret islands — but it’s all simultaneously realistic and comic-book-fun.

I don’t know how he pulled it off; he did something that I don’t think anybody else ever did before: he wrote a prose comic book, a comic book without the comics. I like to think that Grossman began by reading comics, and as he moved on, he decided that the fun of comics should continue when we’re grown-ups, and should be even more fun, more interesting — so he wrote a novel that managed to be a “comic book” without pictures, a comic book that has all the great things I, and others, loved about comics as a kid, but adds things to keep the adults interested, too — takes the battles and outer space adventures and batarangs and then tacks on to them concerns about secret identities and hints of other worlds and ecological disasters and government and bits and pieces of what seems to be “real” science (and “real” magic, for that matter) and somehow did it all in prose so that the fully-developed adult imagination could take that framework, that story, and instead of being tied down by the pictures supplied by an artist, could create their own world with their own superheroes and make it all theirs, while still sharing that experience with everyone else who read it.

If you read– when you read– Soon I Will Be Invincible, picture your “Doctor Impossible” and your “Fatale.” What do they look like? How tall are they? Is their hair long or short? Straight or curly? What color are their eyes? Is Fatale skinny? Curvaceous? That’s all yours to decide, for the most part. The colors of the uniforms, the way Elphin’s spear looks, how Feral stands. All up to you to decide, because while Grossman does a fantastic job of setting up his heroes and villains and the world they live in, he does it in words, the way books always do, and leaves it to your mind to create the images attached to those words.

When I was a very little kid, I read comic books all the time. When I took a break from reading comics, I would go play superheroes with my friends. We moved from reading and seeing the heroes and their adventures to imagining the heroes and their adventures ourselves, creating new stories and pictures and images for them. That’s the natural progression of reading: from easy stories with lots of pictures to more challenging venues with greater rewards, as our minds and imaginations and creativity grow, develop, mature.

I can’t pretend to be a superhero anymore; if I show up at my office with a towel tied around my neck and talking in a deeper voice, people will think I’m (more) ridiculous. Although it would be a great world if I could, instead of wearing a tie, wear a cape.

Soon I Will Be Invincible allows those kids who pretended to be superheroes when they were little to still feel that sense of wonder, to still use their imagination and picture fighting a giant robot or smashing through a street or running faster than anyone ever could, which is why it’s The Best Book To Read If You Were A Kid Who Pretended To Be A Superhero — and a great book to read for everyone, superhero-pretender or not.

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Thinking The Lions is the only website where you can find out why Velociraptors are fake, learn how to play “Cloverfield,” and otherwise follow the hilarious adventures of a guy with a lot of kids, a lot of love of 70s music, a lot of time to watch Battlestar Galactica, and a very patient wife. Life, only funnier.