Look, Walter, We Have To Talk

I really liked Breaking Bad, once upon a time.  These days, it’s become a bit of a slog.
It’s not that Breaking Bad is, well, bad – but at one point, after suffering through another tense episode of Battlestar Galactica, I asked Gini: “Are we enjoying this, or are we appreciating it?”  And everything about the new BSG was top-notch – the effects, the acting, the plotting, the music – except that we were having zero fun watching this grim Shoah-in-space.  So we stopped.
We’re more invested in Breaking Bad, and we have only nine episodes to go, but… I’m not sure how thrilled I’m going to be about it.  I mean, yes, the pitch on Breaking Bad has always been, “Mr. Chips to Scarface,” which is to say that you take a beloved science teacher and turn him into a crime lord.  Well, no real spoilers here, but nine-tenths of the way through the show, Walter is far more crime lord than science teacher, and my sympathy for him has completely evaporated. His ego is in full flight now, his morals eaten up, and every time he does something to pull his fat out of the fire I’m now like, “Come on, man, just put a bullet in that guy’s head.”
So who’s left to root for?  Nobody, really.  In the ascendancy of Walt, it’s like all the other characters have shut down, withdrawing or retreating or dying.  The cast of characters is smaller than when it began.  And as such, Breaking Bad has this problem for me: it’s more disproportionately Walt at a time when I want to see less of Walt.
I’ll stick it out to the end.  We’ve come this far.  But in the beginning, Breaking Bad was this gloriously black comedy, with the mishaps of Walt and Jesse and their klutzy criminal enterprise.  The good news is that Walt’s worked out most of the bugs.  The bad news is that as it turns out, watching vicious efficiency in the drug trade isn’t nearly as entertaining as I’d hoped.

The Clarion Blog-A-Thon: The Final Stretch

This summer has been what we call “Sweeps Week” at La Casa McJuddMetz, since everything that’s happening feels like a bad plot twist from a soap opera. Daughters moving in!  Cancer scares!  Heartache among friends and family!  Oh, the drama is flowing fast and fierce, and so my commitment to the Clarion Blog-A-Thon wavered.
In addition, I am writing the hardest thing I have ever written.  This novel is, I kid you not, shredding my writerly self-esteem.  Why?  Because instead of just charging in and writing the thing chapter by chapter, which would at least give me the satisfaction of seeing my fine prose and going, “Well, I got somewhere,” this time I’m trying to plot the whole thing in advance.  And I am not a plotter.  All my stories flow from instinct, me starting at a weird opening line and struggling my way, sentence by sentence, to the end. I know some people can write random scenes and then stitch them all together at the end like some sort of literary Frankstein(‘s monster), but for me I need to know why and how we got here.
Planning this novel scene by scene makes me feel as clumsy as a foal taking its first steps.  I don’t even have the satisfaction of having written stuff at the end of it.  I just have this morass of ideas, written up clumsily on the Clarion Echo, and every day I’m going, “God, I’m shit.  I’m total shit, aren’t I?  I’m horrid.”
Such is the joy of the writer’s life.
So in the middle of all of this chaos, my eye slipped off my end goal for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  But Clarion?  Is why I am not total shit.  The Clarion Writers’ Workshop is why I’ve had stories published in two dozen different magazines; they levelled me up, taught me how to critique and redraft my own stuff, and I owe them.
As such, I’d like to raise an additional $250 for Clarion before the week is out.  For that, I’ll ask your help.
Every day, between now and Friday, I will be posting about the additional prizes I’ve got for the Blog-a-Thon, some very cool.  I’ve gotten the prizes to encourage you to donate, but at this point the Blog-A-Thon is officially over and I am struggling on my own to complete it for my alma mater.  So I will ask your help; please donate, whatever you can, to help me in a quest that’s been particularly difficult this summer.
To start this Week Of Prizes, I’ll start off with a secret that I don’t think I’ve revealed before. For Neil Gaiman was one of my teachers at Clarion, and he’s the one who gets the most press – mainly because he’s the one who actively told me, “Go ahead and blog about me.  I’m all out there, anyway.”  Other teachers were more reluctant to be shared on the Interwebz, and so I haven’t blogged about them as much, simply to respect their wishes.
This gives the impression that Neil taught me the most, though.  Which is a lie.  I learned a metric ton from each teacher.
But if I had to choose the one who I point to as being responsible for my whole career, it’d be Nalo Hopkinson.
Nalo caught me at the moment when I was most down, literally eight hours after I’d been looking at plane flights out of Clarion – I was on the verge of quitting.  And kindly, calmly, she inspired me to get back on the horse after the terrible story I’d written – all without making any promises of success.  (You never make promises of success to a writer.  Fate is cruel, and you will be crueller.)  And then she gave me some of the bones of advice that have shaped the foundations of my writing, discussions of how to write characters and writing from the body and character voice.
She inspired me.  And so I’m glad to have one of her books in the prize pool today.
The Chaos is a YA novel about a world gone literally berserk – and as is Nalo’s hallmark, the protagonist is a feisty, fascinating girl with strong opinions on life, wandering through the craziness of a Toronto beset by magical weirdness.  As usual, the voice is worth reading alone, because there’s something about the way that Nalo writes that feels like you’re being lectured to by some incredibly fascinating character as they have wild adventures- which, in fact, you are.  I kept reading it, thinking, “This can’t get stranger,” and no, it kept getting even odder.  It is a fun and vibrant read, and you can win an autographed copy for a mere $5 donation.
The current prizes are:

• An autographed copy of “The Chaos,” from Nalo Hopkinson.
• A handwritten letter from the lead character of Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Glamour and Glass” series.
• A signed copy of the script for “What Every Girl Must Know” from my Clarion classmate and upcoming playwright Monica Byrne.
• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks.” 

An Interesting Change

Hey! See that burn there? That’s a bullet wound.
Okay, technically it’s a jacket wound, acquired at the shooting range.  Because when you fire guns, the casings are ejected out of the gun, flying at high enough velocities to do damage to your eye, red-hot from having just thrust a bullet out of the muzzle.  And if you’re unlucky, then that burning brass jacket will arc up, hit the edge of your safety glasses just right, and tumble underneath to be lodged next to your sizzling skin.
Did I mention you’re holding a loaded gun when this happens?
Fortunately, I was calm enough not to wave the gun around while it was burning a small row of blisters against my eyebrow; for all of my neuroses, I’m good in actual crises.  I laid the gun down, barrel pointing down-range, and extracted the jacket, which had cooled enough to only hurt my fingers a little.
Still, it’s a little weird to carry a wound from gun shooting around.
I do like shooting, and am sad I won’t get to do it for a few weeks – last week, I learned that I shoot better if I don’t just hold my breath, but exhale and shoot with empty lungs.  Grouped quite nicely that time around.  And of course, I’ve always wanted to own a gun, but as a depressive this is probably a Very Bad Idea.
Yet all of this shooting gave me an interesting switch earlier today.  I wrote a Tweet that said, “I’m sure someone thinks the spree of shootings is a conspiracy by Obama to ban guns, but I don’t want to look.”  (As it turns out, that “someone” is the lead singer of Megadeth, proving that everyone involved with Metallica is now batshit crazy.)
But the original Tweet? “I’m sure someone thinks the spree of shootings is a conspiracy by Obama to ban our guns.”
Hrm. Little mental shift there.

Would You Like To Wash Your Hands?

Even after the discovery of bacteria, patients kept dying because doctors refused to wash their hands before surgery, pushing all sorts of wonderful diseases deep into their patients’ bodies.  This went on for years.
Some of those deaths can doubtlessly be chalked up to stubborness and habit, but I suspect a lot of the reluctance to wash up went something like this:
“Doctor, before you remove that cyst from my husband’s stomach, would you mind washing your hands?”
“My dear lady, I assure you, I am clean.”
“But they say that there are small creatures that cannot be seen with the naked eye – ones that we all carry with us…”
“Are you saying that I’m filthy?  Disease-ridden?  I’m a skilled physician, with many talents!  You seem to think I’m some common leper, ferrying virulence from place to place!  How dare you insult me by calling into account my cleanliness?  I am a gentleman!”
“I’m – I’m not insulting you, I’m just saying that everyone has these bugs…”
“Oh, so now I’m bug-ridden?”
…and so forth.  End result: dead patient. But a doctor who felt good about himself.
That’s racism in America today.
The problem with racism is that people tend to think of it like a mechanic’s hands at the end of a long work day – crusted with grease, easily obvious.  And there are those kinds of explicit racism out there, the unrepentant hatred of the KKK and such, who are actively out to harm anyone non-white and they don’t care who knows it.  That’s the intentional racism, the kind that stems from a deep-seated harm to hurt people.
But most racism is like the bacteria on a surgeon’s hands: invisible unless you’re looking for it, and entirely unintentional.
See, racism is not usually the “AH HATES ME SOME NIGROES” kind of hatred, but the subtle stuff that links “welfare mothers” with “black people.”  The kind of thing where a white guy who shoots brown people is clearly a maniac and not a reflection on Caucasians, but a brown guy who shoots white people immediately triggers a question of whether that race are terrorists.  It’s the quiet, and often completely unconscious, assumption that a white name on a resume is more qualified than a more foreign name.
Here’s the thing that drives my conservative friends crazy: we all carry racist beliefs within us.  How could we not?  We were raised in a country that had explicitly racist laws in place as recently as fifty years ago, and we still have significant portions of the country who believe that interracial marriage is a bad thing.  A lot of the country is founded on racism, and as such those beliefs have wormed their way deep into the culture in which we were raised – and we have propagated them.
This having racist beliefs does not make you a bad person.  You can’t help having picked up all these little thoughts that hurt other races – some of which are even as subtle as “race no longer matters.”  You were taught them by your parents and friends, who may not have even been aware of the toxic effect those beliefs caused.
My friends freak out, though, when called on the carpet for expressing some of those beliefs.  “I’m not a racist!” they cry.  “I’m a good person!  I haven’t been unthinkingly infected with bad thoughts from outside sources!  I know exactly what I’m thinking!”
Would you like to wash your hands?
You aren’t a bad person for having racist beliefs encoded in your system.  But you become a bad person when you’re called upon to examine your behavior and, like the bad doctor above, spend more time being offended at the idea that you might be a bad person than actually checking yourself to see what they say is true.  If you value your sense of self-esteem over the corroding damage you may be spreading, then yes.  You’ve become a harmful jerk.
That doesn’t mean that every accusation is true, of course.  Sometimes, you take the time to consider an accusation of racist behavior and eventually conclude that no, this is the other person’s problem.  But you don’t do it from the terrified perspective of, “How dare you accuse me of being unclean?  You have problems!”  You do it from the perspective of someone who realizes that you don’t have a handle on every thought in your conscious mind, and sometimes some reflection will show you’ve been spreading some things you don’t want passed about.
Or maybe you just take offense and keep operating.  Your choice.

He's Not Racist, He's My Voter

As an Ohio resident, Jezebel’s headline makes me wince: “Ohio Republican Party: GOP Chairman Made Racist Remarks Because He Thought He Was Speaking Off the Record.”
Doug Priesse’s racist remark was this: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban – read African-American – voter-turnout machine.” Which is the whole reason why they’re attempting to shut down early voting sites.
Now, let us be uncannily kind and assume that maybe, he’s not racist at all.  It is vaguely possible that he is not trying to shut down the “urban” voter-turnout machines because they’re black, but is merely noting that the early-voting policies disproportionately reward black voters.  And he’s not against the early voting policies because they are black, but because it’s not fair that voting procedures are twisted so much to accommodate any one single group – be they black, white, marbled, or pointillated.
Guess what?  That still makes him a fucking dick.
Because the whole point of voting, to any honest and objective person, should be to get as many legitimate voters as you can out to vote.  Any policy that makes it easier for anyone to vote in the single most important thing you can do for our democracy should be lauded, as long as it doesn’t lead to widespread vote fraud (like, say, online voting almost inevitably would).  As a liberal-leaning centrist, I support every Republican effort to get out their vote, because frankly the votes of my opposition should still be counted.
This isn’t just my fucking election.  It is the combined will of the people.  It is larger than just what I want – it’s a temperature taken of the population as a whole, and for this to be more than a dictatorship under my control, this needs to have as many people as we can get invested in the process.
So.  Early voting hours for blacks and fundamentalist Christians alike?  For it.  Mail-in ballots for the military and the civilians?  For it.  Better methods to make it easier to get involved, even if those methods disproportionately favor Tea Party members?
Fucking. For. It.
So what Priesse is saying here is that we should make voting a difficult thing.  Even in absentia of the concern that he’s purposely trying to punish black people for voting Democrat – which is almost certainly the case – it still makes him the kind of guy who wants to turn voting into an elitist machine where only the kinds of people who can jump through certain hoops can do it.
Fuck that.  The Republicans’ efforts to quash voter turnout via ludicrous measurements designed to shut down a voter fraud that even they have to admit doesn’t exist is shameful.  This is shameful.  And if you support them, you should be shamed that your support is, in part, covering this.