Plucking Around for the Week of July 4th

Ataris, Incels, Noir at the Bar, and FoxFoolery

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What do I have to talk about today? Well, the good news for me—and my faithful readers—is that I am changing jobs, and I will have more time to write. I may even feel like writing fiction again! I tenderized my resignatium, to speak in the lingo of Pogo Possum and the delightful denizens of Okefenokee Swamp. And it felt like Sisyphus’s boulder was lifted from my hairy, greying chest.¹

What if Sisyphus was a Platypus? Would he have an epididymis?

My mood has lifted considerably, and in one month I will no longer be performing the duties of a 24/7 on-call Level 3 UNIX administrator, a career I pursued ever since seeing WarGames in the movie theatre² and fell in love with Matthew Broderick’s hacking away at the green and amber terminal screens. My mom bought me an Atari 800XL, I began programming in BASIC and selling floppy disks with software and clip art for Brøderbund’s Print Shop at the Atari User Group which met… I think at Bell Labs? It’s been a while.

I wrote columns for their newsletter under the name Pluck Rogers of the 25th Century for a time, and presented games for review in the auditorium. I was even trolled by users of the Bulletin Board System! I wore a flannel shirt over a t-shirt, which was not yet made de rigeur by Kurt Cobain, and the nerds who preferred pocket tees tucked into chinos began calling me… Penguin Man. So, I’ve been trolled online since 1984.

I’ve carried a pager or a cell phone since there were pagers, and phones were called cell phones, and were carried in a zipper case with a huge battery and a curly cord, like a wall phone. For fewer than 2 years in the past 25 was I not “on call,” to fix some piece of IBM equipment or another, from a huge drum-fed laser printer for National Car Rental, to SGI Indigo graphics renderers for Honeywell, to handheld terminals for stevedores on the docks, server farms for bond analytics, and the Electronic Medical Records systems for a major children’s hospital. It’s all been quite exciting, but I am looking forward to focusing my problem-solving and project management skills at a new position where we work normal business hours and don’t need to perform maintenance on the graveyard shift. In fact, I am giddy at the prospect.

The last 18 months were consumed by a work project that had me working many nights and weekends, with no end in sight. I used to look forward to writing in the evenings and on weekends, and I did manage to write a novel, Vyx Starts the Mythpocalypse, during this time, before it burned me out. I haven’t written a story since “There are Things in the Woods,” available here in the archives, back in March, and it feels like years. I am eager to get back to it.

This month I will be sharing “We Got the Beat,” my story for the Murder-a-Go-Go Anthology edited by Holly West, but in August I hope to share a new story with you, perhaps a Joey Cucuzza conundrum. It will take a little time for the dread to dissipate. I am taking a much-needed vacation, but I think my time at NeCon in July will recharge my writing fires. I am also reading at Noir at the Bar NYC on July 31st:

I’m not sure what I’ll be reading yet. But I hope to see you there. Shade Bar has open windows and they serve crepes and good grog. Come for creeps and crepes. I’ll have copies of books to sign, and maybe a contributor copies of NeCon XL and Vautrin to give away to a lucky attendee.

I’ve read a lot of good articles this past week or two, and I want to share them with you. For one, check out the Substacks that I Recommend. For example, the piece at Planet Carnival on the origins of Mardi Gras in the United States and its ties to the French Revolution, was a great read. I also watched Black Orpheus on his urging, and it was great. If you like Hadestown, check it out.

This piece in the New Yorker on the Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture is an eye-opening and important read. We all seem to “know” that ancient statuary was painted in vibrant colors, but seeing it, and learning why they were scrubbed clean, is something worth reading again and again.

Thanks to Hannah Fischer, who writes WanderFinder, I decided to look up an old nature documentary I haven’t seen since 1987, called Lords of Hokkaido:

This is by Nature on PBS and is about the foxes that live on Japan’s northernmost island. I remembered it because Hannah is reading Bitch: On the Female of the Species, by Lucy Cooke, and one of the themes is how the views of male scientists have skewed the data on behavior and evolution, for example, the myth that males love and pursue sex but females do not either enjoy it, or pursue only monogamy. Which is a steaming load of horseshit. Anyway, this documentary catches two foxes in flagrante delicto and the vixen celebrates the consummation by yapping and thrashing in the snow, performing a show Meg Ryan would be challenged to fake in Katz’s Delicatessen.

I can’t wait to read that book. I’m deep into Horizon by Barry Lopez, where he opines about the culture of ego among male hominin paleontologists, with Mary Leakey throwing shade on her own husband and son, and also reading Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry, a minimalist Irish crime novel that I am enjoying in small pieces.

So what else do I have to share, besides foxfuckery? Well, the history of mass-produced Sliced Bread, invented in Chillicothe Missouri, was more interesting than it has any right to be.

But the best for last is an article by Mary Gaitskill on incels, and how we mock them at our peril. I mean literal peril, as they are one of the groups most commonly radicalized into mass-shooting terrorists. But that’s not the point; the point is that they are also victims of consumerism, body shaming, and patriarchal misogyny—the same as the women they loathe and attack—but they refuse to see it that way. We can’t fix them with pure empathy (or “himpathy,” as Kate Manne would say) but we may help them escape the rabbit hole if we refuse to dismiss them out of hand, and can perhaps nudge them toward realizing that their anger towards women is misguided, and it is the pecking order itself that needs unpeckering. And by “we” I mean men; I’m not dumping this responsibility on women.

The same deal about shutting down “locker room talk” that affirms abusive behavior; men are more likely to know incels and talk to them. I was there on the Something Awful forums when the *chan forums that spawn so much hate spun off, so I watched this vile birth, from Pick-Up Artist forums to the incel backlash and so on. I tried to talk one down in the comments on that article, but I need to read Mick West’s Escaping the Rabbit Hole to learn how to talk to conspiracy theorists and other misguided people more effectively.

Maybe I’ll read that while on vacation.

This weekend, when I’m not working overnight, I will attend the Emilio Carranza Memorial tribute and reenactment, performed by members of American Legion Post 11. There will be photos. If you haven’t read my piece on the “Mexican Lindbergh” Emilio Carranza, his doomed goodwill flight, and the child-funded memorial in the Pine Barrens that marks where his plane crashed, you may enjoy it now.

Have a good weekend, and I’ll be back with a piece on the abandoned airport of Aero-Haven on Wednesday.

1. I always thought “grey” looked more distinguished than “gray” and I reserve it for special occasions, even though I eschew Anglophonic spellings and pronunciations when at all possible.

2. Archaic, I know. My hometown of Nutley had The Franklin Theatre, and I saw The Return of the Jedi, Poltergeist, and many other formative films there. The spelling stuck. I also grew up on East Centre Street in that town, and I wish I’d stolen a street sign before they updated it to the modern spelling.