“I’m not sick,” the old woman who had waved my car down said. 

This morning I got up early to take Brittany, my girlfriend, to City of Hope National Medical Center, not because of COVID-19 but because she had a regularly scheduled doctor visit for her cancer care. The facility was a ghost town, and the day before she had gotten an email saying she couldn’t bring a visitor with her. She would need to get screened for COVID-19 symptoms and I would have to wait outside. I was a little bummed, not only because I like being there with her but because I really wanted to get one of those infrared thermometer checks I’ve seen people get in TV news footage from Asia. 

We had been isolating for the past week and a half (it’s only been a week and a half?); her treatments suppress her immune system and my day job is at a coffee shop, which brings me into contact with hundreds of people. My coffee shop serves a kind of tea that people seem to believe has medicinal properties (it doesn’t. It has a lot of sugar in a hot liquid, that’s what’s making you feel better for 20 minutes), and so we were getting a lot of unwell customers through. I walked away from my shifts because I needed to be available for Brittany and I couldn’t risk getting infected by some rando looking for a Cold Buster.

The isolation hasn’t been hard for me – I’m an indoor kid – but what has been hard has been seeing this crisis happen and feeling sidelined. I don’t know how to be of service right now; I know that staying home is being of service, that giving up paychecks to remove myself from the chain of transmission is being of service, but it doesn’t feel like really being of service. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything when I fuck around in my house in sweats all day. 

And now for something completely different.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a novelist; over the years my writing found other outlets, but recently those old fiction muscles have been twitching. I’ve answered their call by writing some fiction stuff, and I’ve not known what to do with it, so I’ve decided to just go ahead and publish it on my Patreon.

Here’s a sample of The Ultimate Vengeance of Professor Death, a post-superhero novella in twelve chapters. You can read the remaining chapters by becoming a $10 patron on my Patreon – www.patreon.com/cinemasangha. If you’ve been thinking about supporting the site, this is a great time to do so!

And, full disclosure, I may put this up as a Kindle Single if there is enough of a response. Yes, that cuts into possible new subscribers, but I’m not trying to rip people off, just make a living.

Without further ado, the first two chapters of…

Continue reading “The Ultimate Vengeance Of Professor Death: A Novella” →

There used to be a familiar refrain in the aftermath of a mass shooting: don’t name the killer. Don’t give him the fame he wanted. I never took to this – it always seemed like magical thinking to me, a connection to the old days when a name was a power object – but I understood the rationale well enough.

Today we don’t really know the names of mass shooters, and I don’t think it’s because this campaign for an attitudinal shift worked. I think it’s because no one can keep up with them. Of all the statistics about shootings in this country, this is maybe the one that shakes me the most: these events are so common we don’t even have the time or the energy to care about who did it.

I come from the world of true crime and serial killer fascination; reading about and learning about the worst offenders in history are hobbies of mine. I do not turn away from these people – if anything I’m fascinated by these deadly outliers. But the mass shooter is no longer an outlier; he’s an increasingly banal figure stepping out of the shadows, unsurprisingly legal weapon in his hand. He’s angry, disaffected, almost always white. 99% of the time a he. We are fascinated by novelty – there was a time when mass shootings were so novel that they warranted songs about them, not in protest but in kind of stunned amazement (“I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats, about one of the few mass shootings carried out by a woman) – and the reality is that mass shooters are no longer novel.

At the same time mass shootings are not quite banal. We are in a place where the same horrifying thing happens with almost clockwork regularity; we endure scheduled public traumas. The horror is real but everything else is kind of a blur. It’s the equivalent of being jumped by six guys – each fist and foot is a new and terrible pain, but the people beyond the limbs are out of cognitive range. The fists and the feet are almost independent agents of hurt.

There’s another song I think about, Phil Ochs’ “Universal Soldier.” It paints a picture of one soldier throughout history, fighting and dying in all wars:

He’s five foot-two and he’s six feet-four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He’s all of thirty-one and he’s only seventeen
He’s been a soldier for a thousand years

He’s a Catholic a Hindu an Atheist a Jain
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
And he knows he shouldn’t kill
And he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he’s fighting for Canada
He’s fighting for France
He’s fighting for the USA
And he’s fighting for the Russians
And he’s fighting for Japan
And he thinks we’ll put an end to war this way

And he’s fighting for Democracy
He’s fighting for the Reds
He says it’s for the peace of all
He’s the one who must decide
Who’s to live and who’s to die
And he never sees the writing on the wall