Ursula K. LeGuin (In Memoriam)

If I ever get The Question™, Le Guin will be there. That's the question about "your influences" that all writers get eventually. (I'll have to write some more fiction before I get the question, but it's out there....somewhere.) Even if they only want two or three names, Le Guin will be there.

I picked up one or another of Le Guin's books several times growing up and in my twenties, and I never had a taste for them. They were thick and sticky, like the books we had to read in high school and there weren't enough proton phase blaster or quantum resonance detonations. Biff McManthighs wasn't unloading a cargo carrier of whup ass on some Badly Bad Baddies who were clearly analogues of Nazis or had an exoskeleton and a penchant for genocide.

At some point in my early thirties, I realized it was possible, even likely, that I did not actually have all the answers, and perhaps more profoundly, that the place where I perspicaciously insisted there could be no answers might include more insight than I was allowing if I stepped outside of the presumptions that everything I happened to believe right this moment was the natural order of things.

It was about that time when I picked up The Dispossessed. I was annoyed at a growing sense that my writing career was probably going to be best served by a brush with college and academia's attitudes towards genre were notorious. I read it mostly to arm myself with a dirty genre writer that even the lit somalliers couldn't deny. I would be armed with a counterpoint.

In Le Guin I found writing that asked questions rather than being cocksure of the answers. I found ambiguity. I found delightful characters and a moral compass that didn't presume righteousness, but only that the assumptions should be questioned. And the writing was so elegant and precise and a breathtaking example of prose rhythm.


Within a few days I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness as well. Then The Wizard of Earthsea. Then..... And then I just kept going. I couldn't get enough. I'm not sure there's a Le Guin novel I haven't read at this point (though I do occasionally stumble upon a previously undiscovered short story.) With every work I found an exquisite lesson in how to empathetically challenge the status quo.

Yesterday the news broke that Ursula K. Le Guin died. She was 88, in poor health, and it was not a shock, but I still retreated to my pillow fort, reread "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (again), and cried. She is so important to who I am a writer and I feel like I lost a mentor.

We were lucky to have her for the time we did. And so fucking fortunate that her words live on.

In Memoriam (John DeCoster)

Like many students, I left high school feeling vaguely violated over what I’d just endured, and a mild sort of antagonism towards the teachers who’d put me through it. I know some students stay and have a moment with their teachers–I've had a few from the other end myself–but for me there was a little Chris-shaped hole in the wall.

I came into my realization of the teachers who had changed the course of my life when I came to those moments where the course of my life bent and realized who I was remembering and what lessons had stayed with me.

It was those teachers who endured, even after decades, who I came to realize were the good ones. While there are dozens I can picture, I can't really remember their names. They did their thing. I resisted on principle. Somehow I walked out with knowledge despite myself. Certainly becoming a teacher myself opened my eyes to how difficult it could be–how instantly the Stand and Deliver fantasy shatters when triaging a state mandated curriculum to a class size of thirty students who would rather be getting a root canal. However, it wasn’t the lessons themselves that resonated. 

These days I can’t tell you how to do a geometry proof. I'm not sure I could map the covalent bonds on a sugar molecule.  I don’t remember Bastille day.

And even though these days I pay my bills with writing, I still need to look up lay and lie.

The teachers I remember decades later didn’t teach me what to learn; they taught me how to learn. They gave me confidence, showed me how to find the path, challenged me. I can find Bastille day in five seconds on my phone, but knowing why the French Revolution was the first domino of modern history is much more complicated. I can reteach myself the covalent bonds of a sugar molecule in five minutes because I know what a covalent bond is and how they work.

I remember those teachers who taught the how even though it was harder. The ones who answered my ceaseless questions for hours, who scaffolded with games that ate their seat time, but to this day help me understand the alliances that led to WWI. I remember the directors who gave me a sense within all future artistic endeavors of how much work lay between “I can’t even read this music” and so many trophies they wouldn't fit on the bus. 



And I remember Mr. DeCoster.

I remember him particularly. I took him more than any other English teacher, always going back to him if he was an option, even for that Film as Lit coast-a-thon that my parents insisted I could only take if I did American Lit simultaneously. (“I get to watch movies for English credit and the only downside is he’s going to interrupt every minute to tell me what’s happening? That’s AWESOME!”) I couldn’t have told you at the time why I liked him so much. I vaguely hated school and most teachers were sort of “the enemy.” But decades later I still remember with how much poise he could navigate a classroom lesson. I don't remember the gerund vs. infinitive or how to analyze A Separate Peace. I remember how he never let us forget the tremendous power and gravitas of language to hold sway our hearts, but somehow also never let us take ourselves too seriously either.  A "Fenork" if I forgot my homework. A "Good man Stan!" if I remembered it. But he never let the levity float out of his reach either–we were learning the language of Shakespeare and Faulkner and Twain, and we weren't going to forget it.

He threaded that needle of laughter and profundity with such a casual grace that the only word that springs to mind is from Victorian court: sprezzatura– the skill so practiced that it can be performed in a way that makes it look easy. He drove the too serious and the not serious enough to apoplectic irritation, but even that never got to him. It was almost as if he knew how to teach despite us.

Lastly a story: It was late fall and two football players came in to discuss their failing grades. I won’t mention their names, but I knew them both. They were ineligible because of their grade point average and the CIF playoffs hung in the balance. We were doing well that year. The players were going around to get their grades improved so they could play. It would be some time before I realized what an indictment of so many things at Canyon High their sheer audacity signaled.

DeCoster was having none of it.  “Hell no! I’m not going to change your grades!” he practically laughed. “Oh fenork! You earned those grades. Why would you even ask? Do other teachers do this crap for you? Get out of my class.” 

Not a day goes by in the world around me–a world that in the last year and change has tried so very hard to chip away at who I am and what I believe is right.....  A world that asks me to compromise my integrity and take the path of least resistance…. A world where it is becoming easier to keep quiet if you're not the ones they're coming for....

Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that lesson of integrity and probity. Not a waiver. Not a pause. Not a hedge. Not a blink. “Hell no!” he said. How could they even ask? 



Sorry if I can’t keep those misplaced and dangling modifiers straight, Mr DeCoster, but you taught me some pretty good stuff all the same.

Peak Orangosity

If you peel away the first five or six years of my existence (when my memory was pretty sketchy), I've had a little orange friend with me for nearly half my life.

I first met her in 2001. My ex spouse had left me for the second time and this separation involved several months, so I was living on my own. My coworker approached me and asked me if I wanted a cat.

At the time she went by "Mercedes" and had a bit of a reputation for being loopy and overly energetic. "That cat is crazy," was an oft uttered phrase when she came up as a topic of conversation in the service area. She'd passed through three other owners, including two of my co-workers who just couldn't hang with her...exuberance. I wasn't particularly excited about having a pet at that time either.

But then my coworker explained the situation. She was pregnant. (The coworker, not the cat.) And the man she was pregnant with was abusive to Mercedes. Not just unpleasantly anti-cat or callous. He was downright sadistic. He would smack her around. Put her out on the balcony and dump a pitcher of water on her. Chase her under the bed and reach under it for her, and if Mercedes scratched his arm in her terror of self-preservation, he would pull up the whole mattress up, grab her by her scruff, and toss her into walls. He was never in a million years going clean up the cat box after her. And with my coworker pregnant, she couldn't risk getting toxoplasmosis. Would I please take the cat?

[Edit to add: a number of people have asked me about this relationship since people who abuse animals seldom stop with animals. I'm happy to report that she got out of that situation and is with a great guy now.]

She was an orange tabby. Female tabbies are pretty rare...kind of like male calicos, but she defied the odds. In more ways than one.

At first, I was not thrilled. She shed her white and orange fur all over my new black futon. She scratched up the leather recliners that were on loan to me from a friend. She bolted around the house at all hours meowing like she was in combat with nine or ten invisible rabid wombats. And she was anxious from her abuse. She wouldn't really let me pet her, and if I so much as sneezed she would run out of the room in terror. Skittish beyond functionality. I found food in weird places and the water dish knocked over. And she kept knocking shit off of high places.

I had made a huge mistake saying yes. I was not ready to be responsible for anything, let alone this unholy orange  I even asked about seeing if the coworker would help me rehome her.

It was the third or fourth night when I fell asleep in the couch form futon without pulling it out into a bed. I drifted off feeling vaguely sorry for the train wreck my life had become. Long after I was sound asleep, in the deep quiet of the wee morning hours, I felt a tiny body curl up into the small of my back. If I moved, she bolted. If I reached out, she bolted.

But if I held perfectly still–just perfectly, perfectly still–she started to purr.

The next day it was as if nothing had happened. She was gone with my first morning twitch and spent the day caterwauling through the apartment at cheetah speeds. But the next night she jumped up sooner. And the next morning she left later. Four days in, she let me pet her. At first it was a gentle touch, but within a few minutes, she bunted my hand for the first of about a gazillion times.

She was a cat and I was a person, but slowly we came to some kind of detente. She stopped running around late at night. I calmly picked up after her whirlwinds. She never really warmed to being in my lap, but she was always curled up next to me. She learned I would never hurt her, and her jerkiest moments of jerkitude barely got a raised voice, and in return she stopped running out of the room every time I shifted position or sucked in breath to cough. Eventually the tiniest touch would get her purring. I leaned in one morning–something that would have spooked her earlier–and with her eyes barely slitted in trust she extended her nose towards me.

Boop. We bumped noses.

"I found someone who might take her," my coworker said the next day.

"No!" I said.  Then after a pause: "No....I think that's okay. I feel like we make each other....less broken."

She was the first pet I ever had that was definitively "mine." She was the first one who picked me to snuggle in a line up. She was the first one to come to me without prompting and the first to make sure I knew it was time for some pets. She was the first pet that went beyond a passably affectionate chore and stole my heart right through my rib cage.

She decided she needed a new name for her new life. Obviously I had nothing to do with such a decision, but Mercedes would simply no longer do. The high energy, bullet dodging, jumping and leaping exploits of Princess Mononoke from the Miyazaki film decided her name almost without my help. I was watching the movie. I looked over. And she nodded in agreement.

It was decided.

Of course as soon as she heard she was a princess, she decided it was time to act like one. And of course that had nothing to do with me spoiling her. Nope. The Mononoke part was mostly remembered as an afterthought as she demanded most of the bed, dinner exactly when, and my loving attention no matter what I was doing.

Jumping onto my computer and lying down on the keyboard while I was writing was a daily occurrence.

She always seemed to know she was orange. She would always sleep on blue things that brought out the orange, and she actually acted sort of unimpressed before by other things that were orange even knocking over cups and such. The oranger something was, the more she hated it, and the bluer it was, the more she wanted to be on it as much as possible. It became a running joke that she would not suffer anything that failed to acknowledge or dared to upstage her Royal Orangosity. Acknowledging how orange she was became sort of a thing, and my friends humored me her.

Her kitten energy wouldn't last forever, but there were bird heads aplenty at the threshold while it did. After she shifted into cat middle age, there were cranky meows when I would come to and fro, turn on lights, get into bed. Anything that disturbed her got me a cantankerous "Meyehhh." But as irascible and crotchety as she got, she always booped my nose, curled up next to me, and started purring.

Seventeen years we kept each other company. Partners came and went. Friendships sparked and died. I quit my job as a manager of restaurants and went back to serving, then quit that job too. I went to school and got a degree. I became a teacher. I started writing in earnest. I started getting paid to write. Homes were moved into and out of. I was asked to leave my family and moved out. Through it all, we were each other's support. No matter what happened, eventually we'd boop noses, curl up next to each other, and she would purr while I scritched her cheeks and pet her back.

The kidney disease made life harder. There was more routine. Longer instruction manuals for whomever watched her when I was out of town. Lots of concern about getting enough water.  But she was actually doing quite well for how long she'd had it. That is to say her blood panels looked pretty good when I took her to the vet two weeks ago. But she was not actually doing quite well.

All the water in the world added to her expensive special diet didn't stop the tumor behind her eye. Steroids gave us another couple of weeks, but they just reduced inflammation. Cancer's inexorable march was only postponed.

Or as I like to think of it, she saw that our new president was an anthropomorphic cheeto who was even oranger than she was, and that was simply not okay. "Fuck this shit," she meowed at his orange countenance. "I'm out."

We talked that last day. Not long, for there was some urgency, but for an hour or two. I told her that we found each other broken and we helped each other heal, but also that my scar was always going to ache without her. Cats like to hear these things about how they'll be missed, you understand. I wasn't being maudlin or anything. Purely for her benefit.

But then it was time.

I tucked my breaking heart into my pocket, and held her through her last journey.

"It's okay, baby girl," I said. "It's okay."

The weirdest things totally get to me right now. The quiet. The gaps. The spaces between. I miss the nose boops and falling asleep petting her purring body, but it's the tiny moments of null energy that thunder through my heart.

Shutting off the lights in my room to leave, I thought to myself that I should leave one on for—

Oh.

Saturday I walked into my room and no one yelled at me. You know....for having the temerity to open the door.

The pressure sensitive cat bed (that I swore I'd never get) sat on my bed (where I swore I would never put it). Her food was uneaten in the bowl next to the door. The thought that I need to fill the water bowl and clean the box turned into a lancing ache.

Getting into bed and not hearing her objecting "Meyahhh" that I'm shifting her sleeping zone.

The quiet is the loudest part.

You were a very good girl, Princess Mononoke. You brought light and joy to half my life. You were my cat.

And you were very, very orange.

Drowned in the Moonlight, Strangled by her Own Bra

Continuing my glorious tradition of being absolutely behind the curve of popular culture, I am finally just getting to this post about some of my feelings regarding Carrie Fisher's death.

Though most know the story now, let me mention it one more time:

"George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, "You can't wear a bra under that dress."
So, I say, "Okay, I'll bite. Why?"
And he says, "Because. . . there's no underwear in space. What happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't—so you get strangled by your own bra.
Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra."

-Carrie Fisher

Apparently what they did have was gold alloy bikinis. For some reason....


Because of my age at the time, my absolutely unhealthy love of Star Wars, and my relationship to my imagination (and the characters who inhabit it) that was, even then, a kudzu that occasionally sent long runners of overgrowth across my sense of reality. I never fell for the "little people inside the TV" trick, but there were a few worlds I remember learning weren't real only very slowly and painfully. Star Wars was a particularly enduring myth for me. I never really stopped wanting to be a jedi.

My mind has never been able to quite wrap completely around the idea that Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia were the same person. Of course I know it intellectually. Of course.  Of COURSE! But maybe......when you're not quite ten and the world of your imagination is still so real, sometimes you find those beloved characters irredeemably filed under a separate "listing" from their actors. I simply learned to love Han and Luke and Leia too early for me to ever be able to combine them with Harrison, Mark, and Carrie without just a little tiny bit of deliberate, conscious thought.

So Carrie Fisher was always this separate person, in a way.

I knew Carrie as a talented writer–I was still in early high school when I picked up one of her books. She was a superb example of how mental illness and addiction affect but never determine the arc of a person's life. And she displayed an unapologetically open honesty about her life, warts and all. Later I also came to know her as a feminist and a wonderfully outspoken critic of ageism and body shaming. She is on a short list of writers who, in bearing it all, remind me how exposed and vulnerable it SHOULD be to be an artist. How much courage it takes to be honest about one's shortcomings and moral failings.

Today I'm kind of glad for that disconnect though. I get get to have two heroes. General Organa will go on being as fierce as ever and fighting the good fight against space nazis in an ever more topical and relevant universe to our current situation. She will go on fighting for what's right in her own equally important and effective way while the boys go off and get their toxic masculinity on.

Carrie Fisher's light has gone out of the universe, but if I understand anything about her, it's that she met that end with an open honesty. More importantly, her words will endure. Her light helped kindle a million more flames that have become a beacon across the star filled night.

Including my own.

Terri Pratchett: In Memoriam

Early today the news began to break across my Facebook that Sir Terry Pratchett has died. I am almost embarrassed to say, I've never read much beyond Good Omens. I've tried three different times with three different Diskworld books and they never grabbed me. I am assured that I simply need to read the right one. Maybe now, for the sake of sentimentality, I will try again in earnest. I'm always up for good "cherry popping" recommendations.  

I can't provide a good send off to an author I'm not familiar with, but I know many of you dearly loved Pratchett. That sound I heard was millions of readers' hearts breaking. So consider this an open invitation to share in comments personal thoughts, links you feel did him justice, great book recommendations, or just commiserate with others.

[This news is going to mean I have two posts today. Apologies in advance to folks on e-mail notification or feeds. Our new poll will go up tomorrow.]

Leonard Nimoy In Memoriam (Personal Update)

If you know any geeks at all in your life, you know that Leonard Nimoy died. It was all over all my social media when I woke up. I would love to tell you that celebrity news never affects me, but this one hit me where I live.

See, there was a time in my young adult life when I was riddled with A.D.D. (but didn't know it), and I thought I was a terrible person and a fuck up in life because I couldn't seem to get my shit together when it came to remembering when to be home or doing homework or practicing. My parents and teachers kept demanding to know why I didn't just apply myself a little more, and I had no answers. I didn't know why I was SO damned bad at concentrating. I was obviously just kind of useless.

I felt like I cared about things, but when it came time to act, I would constantly mess them up. After years of being told "Why don't you care about this?" eventually you start to wonder if you really do. How could anyone who cared be so easy to distract? How could a sincere intention not to talk in class or come home late or end up daydreaming while doing homework fail if I weren't just a fuck up?

A lot of my young life was spent feeling pretty worthless.

What I didn't know was that I had a brain that was working differently. That my diagnosis at five of hyperactivity wasn't just some funny doctor's reason for why I was a bad kid. My mom was working tirelessly behind the scenes to beat off every teacher and administrator who wanted to get me on this new drug called Ritalin. No one ever really explained to me that it wasn't my fault.

My sophomore year in high school I was given the Star Trek 5 Movie boxed set. (Six would come out on VHS later that year.) I watched them over and over and over and over. I didn't realize what was happening at the time (I do now) but with Star Trek going on in the background I could THINK better. I could focus for longer. I could remember things. My mind didn't seem to slip away from me quite as easily. I could even sit down and write....for hours.

Even at that age, I wanted to be a writer, and perhaps the greatest thing I discovered was that if Star Trek was humming in the background I wouldn't be so damned distracted by everything. I would sit and write and it would just keep coming out.

Star Trek made it possible for me to write.

The perceptions I have of that time in my life are clouded with angst and hormones and nearly twenty-five years ~coughcoughcough~ of memory. I got grounded all the time because of my grades, and though I look back on an absurdly privileged existence, at the time I was deeply vested in the "My life sucks" milieu.   

However, there was a very real way in which Star Trek was a profound comfort to me. The way bibliophiles at that age sometimes describe books as friends, I felt about Star Trek. I would put them on and feel my mind calm. They didn't judge. They didn't wonder why I sucked. They were always the same story, so I could miss something and it would be okay. For at least a year, I probably watched one of those movies almost every day. While they droned in the background (and little known to me, calmed my distractible brain to a point where it could concentrate) the world would not seem so insurmountable. With the possible exception of Star Wars, I may have seen the Star Trek movies more than anything else as a kid.  (Especially 2, 4, and 6.) Literally hundreds of times each. 

I don't have a lot to say. Eighty-three is a good run, and I had a feeling when he was admitted to the hospital with chest pains that we were going to get this news. About half of the original actors have passed now, and those that haven't are in their seventies and eighties. Actors are mortal even if they give us something of themselves that will last forever. 

But I am undoubtedly sad. 

Nimoy's final tweet.
Now where did I put those tissues...

I know Nimoy was so much more than Spock. I loved his book I Am Not Spock and his photography projects were a profound display of the best of humanity. He fought for pay equality back in the 60s when people just didn't do that. In fact, he was a writer as well, publishing two very successful autobiographies. But like many geeks of my generation he got "locked in" to his role in my mind before I understood the difference between actors and their characters, and I almost have a hard time seeing him as anyone but Spock. 

My Facebook feed exploded with the "my friend" quote or "live long and prosper" or the funeral scene from Wrath of Khan (which I can't even handle right now) but here's the one that has meant the most to me as I've navigated social justice and entered a world in which empathy, compassion, and a ceaseless struggle against human nature has taken center stage from the endless vicissitudes of overly rational thinking:

"Logic is the BEGINNING of wisdom, Valeris, not the end. "

[ETA-As this sort of became it's own article as I wrote it, I moved the original status report beginning to the bottom. Feel free to skip this part.]

• I'm finishing up something for Ace of Geeks today. If you want to know the moment it lands be sure to follow me through one of the "All Updates" media. In the meantime, I give you a blast from the past about the movie Ender's Game, and why I might never see it. (I still haven't).
• I didn't remember anything going on from my last save in Skyrim (apparently I am supposed to assassinate someone--what???), so I had to restart it in order to do my ongoing research to continue my Skyrim Articles. I'm about half way to where I was in the main quest line and my eyes have not started bleeding yet. I must try harder!
• Since The Contrarian is a part of the Top Secret New Zealand strike team (that you didn't hear about from me), I have been delighting in the fact that when I clean things, they stay clean. (If that's not a sign you're old/have kids, I don't know what is.) Hopping up to get that post up yesterday meant that I had to skip cleaning or patrol, and with no heroes in town to do patrol for me, it had to be cleaning. It's pretty sad when you're really looking forward to getting to some cleaning, but welcome to my life. 
• And then there's this last thing–news I woke up to, which affected me more than I care to admit and made my early morning writing too raw and personal for blogging: