The Cold Inclusive

I was thinking about Veronica Mars the other day and then later, perhaps coincidentally??? I read about how that show is probably going to get cancelled. Which is fine, I stopped getting weepy about shows I like being cancelled a long time ago. So hardened is my heart that I don’t even watch TV anymore, I just wait for the hivemind to sort it out, then make the necessary changes to my Netflix queue.

But anyways what I was thinking about Veronica Mars was actually about that song by Louis XIV. (Don’t make me link to an mp3 or the video, this is hard enough.) I realize there are so many reasons why I shouldn’t even dare to have that song on Chlamydia, my iPod. Their name is dumb, and the singer has a horrifying affected accent, and they’re associated with that blogger girl who for some reason everyone hates, and they sound like the world’s worst Hold Steady cover band. Gotcha.

And yet, and yet. That is the the song that was playing in the background when Veronica and Logan Echolls first made out, on the balcony at the motel, so for me it will always be a song that speaks to the heated ferocity and rollercoaster horror of unbridled animal lust.

So I was listening and thinking that if Veronica Mars the show ever got cancelled, the actors who play Veronica and Logan should just make it their job to be in porn movies together. Because I would watch that shit all day. I’m not even sure which one I’m more attracted to. Or if attraction is even the point. It’s just the primal, ineffable magnetism between the two, their complex, tortured coupling transcending all space and time.

And so now that it looks like the show is a goner, I just wanted to put my vote out there, in terms of what kind of entertainment I could see replacing the hole in my life that will be left by the show. Hivemind, do with this information what thou wilt.

Sometimes when you are parked at a house, they have a steep, curved driveway and no room at the top for you to perform a K-turn, so you can’t drive back down going forward as you are generally accustomed to. So you have to drive in reverse, but you are scared because the driveway is unfamiliar, and it’s nighttime and you should have left hours ago, plus maybe you had an imported beer or two, I mean you’re not drunk, just a little buzzed. Fine to drive. You do it all the time. Whatever. The point is, you are pretty certain that there is no way you’ll be able to back your car down the driveway without ramming into the wall or banging into one of the poplars or something.

The trick is to not use the rear-view mirror AT ALL. I know it’s hard to avoid that temptation, because you think: I am going backwards, I need to see what’s behind me. But you DO NOT. You can’t actually see the driveway back there, and plus you will get caught up in the “turning the wheel left turns the car not the opposite of the way you think it would” business that always comes with driving backwards.

Instead, you’ll want to hunker down low into your driver’s side mirror. Do not remove your eyes from the driver’s side mirror the whole way down the driveway. If possible, get it angled down so you can see the back left tire. Put her in reverse and go slow, and what you do is keep a tight but comfortable distance between the rear left tire and the edge of the driveway. When the curb starts to shift and get farther out or closer in from the tire, turn the wheel to compensate and maintain the distance. Just go slow and do that the whole way down and you will be all set. You will be back out in the road and off to see your other girlfriend or home to update your blog or whatever in no time. Serious. I hope you found this lifehack helpful.

Basically just because I travel a lot, and spend a lot of time in airports. And I like to meet new people and I like thinking about all the secret things we never find out about each other, and all the circuitous and distant ways in which we are all inevitably connected, if we ask the right questions.

So here’s what I want: programmable software in my cellphone or my mp3 player or whatever it is we’re using to communicate with each other in five years. I want to be able to write to its database basically every detail of my life. Who my parents were and where I went to college, sure, but also the name of the guy who cut my hair when I was twelve, and the full names of all my step-sister’s cousins, and the name of my mom’s old boss, and every friend I’ve ever had, and everyone I knew in high school, and every town and street where I’ve ever lived, and the names of the bands I’ve been in, and the URLs for my websites, and which World Series games I’ve been to, and every job I’ve ever had and every coworker at each of those jobs, and people I only met once but who left a very positive impression.

And so I walk around with this program always sending out very short roaming signal, like 10 yards, and then it’ll buzz me whenever it finds a match in someone else’s database. I can then look and see what it turned up. Whoa no way there is a woman sitting near me who used to work with my Grandma Ellen in the kitchen at that hotel where she worked all those years before she got sick and had to be put into a nursing facility. And then I can meet this woman and hear what her story is, and we can have this little connection about my Grandma Ellen, who I loved very dearly and who died of a stroke ten years ago, but goodness in her younger days she was certainly quite a firecracker, or so I have learned from stories.

And it doesn’t have to be some big conversation, we don’t have to stay pen pals forever, but it can be a nice little moment, a meaningful human interaction where otherwise we would have both stayed silently sitting and watching two mouths jabber at each other on the Fox News television, in the airport with the terrible acoustics where you can barely hear anything, and there’s no free wifi and there’s nothing healthy to eat, and they need to turn up the air conditioning because it is so uncomfortable in here, and I am so tired from carrying these bags and I have been traveling forever and I just want to get home. I just want to get home.

It is a blessing and curse to be a fantasy writer these days. On the one hand, you can’t swing a dead cat at the movie theater without whacking an epic quest involving elves and dragons. You think surely, once you finish that novel you’re working on, you’ll be flooded with offers for book and movie deals. But on the other hand, every teenager with a D&D manual is getting a book deal, so the pressure is really on for you to actually finish the damn thing, and I mean fast.

So what can you do to speed up the process and finish your novel in a timely fashion? Good news: I can help, via the magic of outsourcing. I recently quit my job and am now a freelance writer of proper nouns for fantasy novels. We all know that the hardest part of fantasy writing is coming up with all those weird names for people and places, but I happen to be really good at it, so please utilize my innate talent to ease your hardship!

Just to show you how good at this I am, I will give away a few, for free. I can work in all the major fantasy arcana:

Elven:

• Lyrria (an enchanted Elven queen, perhaps)
• Illyirstrya (castle hidden within enchanted forest)

Dragon:

• Gwohldjnna (dragon who lives alone in an enchanted cave)
• Hrynful (enchanted cave (see above))

Human:

• Malafash of Finkiln (warrior from sea-side town (threw in an extra one for you there!))
• Boldkeep (castle that needs protecting, perhaps where an enchanted sword/princess lives)

Ogre/Half-Orc:

• Fulgmjür (low-level worker creature, -3 intelligence)
• Gröthmorg (fiery underground lair where the ogres are plotting their dastardly revenge. But look out, here comes Malafash!)

I guarantee that the proper names I give you will be 100% original and unique. You don’t want to find yourself embroiled in another Aragorn/Eragon controversy when you should be sitting back and collecting those fat royalty checks. By outsourcing the naming duties, your worries about being sued by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien will practically vanish!

And please do not think this is one of those “ironic” blog posts, where the writer is actually poking fun at the thing they are writing about. This is not the case! I seriously just quit my job to pursue this avocation. I told my boss to go fuck himself and everything, so this has to work. No way can I go back there. To further prove my intentions, I am not even including all of the funny names I can think of, like Schmegmata and Vulvasaur.

Please contact me c/o this website if interested. Serious inquiries only. Please no sci-fi. Sci-fi is retarded.

So the other day my Team Leader came by my cubicle (Such was his mastery, that with merely a few flicks of his verbal paintbrush, a full-color portrait of his offline life came into brilliant, horrifying view) to show me a memo she had written. She wanted me to review it before it went out to the entire company. I took it from her and just stared at it, in shock. The memo was written entirely in Comic Sans. I couldn’t even actually read the words, I just stared at it, thinking Oh no, no no no, what should I do? I am holding a memo written in Comic Sans. ;_; I was so amazed and horrified that I just handed it back to her without even reading it and was like “OK looks great!” And as a result I failed to notice that she had completely screwed up the directions to the location of the event that the memo was about, and so office-wide panic and chaos ensued. Which is I guess my fault, for not really reviewing her work, but of course it WAS NOT MY FAULT because surely Comic-Sans-induced Temporarily Office Blindness is a disorder officially recognized by the AMA.

All, all of which is to say that after she left I started Googling all kinds of things like “How do you gently break it to your boss that use of Comic Sans is met with the same degree of horror as baby-raping?” There is no shortage of discussion on the internet about how Comic Sans is not used in polite society, but most of those posts would be too mean to forward to someone you work with. There needs to be a helpful resource where you can just lay bare the facts for the older generation and be like We’re sorry, we never ever should have left you alone in a room with a computer that had that font on it. We are as much to blame as you are. Someone please make a website like that and together we will teach our elders. Internet, hear my plea. I invoke the spirits of Jason Kottke, et al.

Our coworkers have so little to look forward to in-between child-rearing and death. They think liberal use of Comic Sans will inject levity and bonhomie into their soul-crushing existences, but it does not. This is quickly becoming a post about the need in our society for legal medically-assisted suicide, so I’ll just leave off and hope that someone seriously has some ideas about how I can prevent future use of Comic Sans in my office.