In Which I Watch Movies Slowly Disappear

For me, movies are the special place to go.  I love walking into the theater, finding my seat, feeling that special darkness engulf me.  I love the excitement of the trailers, getting jazzed for the film.  I love the meditative effect the theater has upon me, the way I focus on a film when the lights go down that I cannot accomplish at home.  I even love the audience, the laughs when there’s a good gag, the shrieks of terror.  It’s a communal thing akin to worship; all of us wanted to see this film, and we all gathered here to find out how this thing is.
But I spoke to a friend of mine who has kids, and loves movies.  And her kids hate going to the movies.  She struggles to bring them.
To her kids, the movies are so patently inferior to watching it at home, they can’t believe that Mom wants to do this.  You have to go when the movie theater tells you the movie starts.  You can’t pause the film to go to the bathroom.  You can’t eat what you like.  You can’t lay on the floor in front of the TV and color.  It’s a very inconvenient thing, going to the theater.
The sadness is, I agree with them.  Movies are inconvenient.
It’s why I like them.
It’s why they’ll probably die.
Thing is, movies get a bad rap these days because they’re overpriced – which is true – and because the audiences are often texting, yammering idiots – which is also true.  But I remember an interesting parallel that happened with the movie The Hurt Locker, which was about a bomb technician in Iraq.  When Gini and I saw it, it was such a tense experience we burned calories.  She gripped my arm hard enough to leave bruises, and my thighs clenched so much that I had charley horses at the end of the film, because ZOMG WHAT IF THAT BOMB GOES OFF.  It was a brutal, beautiful example of how to invest a viewer in an experience that we raved about it to all of our friends.
Half of them loved it as much as we had.  The other half were bored to tears, asking us what the hell we were thinking.  And when we investigated this discrepancy in love, we discovered an interesting fact:
The bored contingency watched it almost exclusively on DVD.
That’s the thing about DVDs; it’s convenient, yes, but you don’t have to give it your full attention.  If you miss something, you can rewind.  If there’s a phone handy, you can text.  If you don’t want to watch it, well, you’ve got the rest of the world around you.  And that meant that The Hurt Locker, which worked so well when it swelled on the big screen to fill your whole world, was kind of lame when you could just sort of skim by it.
And I do that a lot, don’t get me wrong.  I watch about 70% of my movies while working, which means they’re not getting my full attention.  Which is fine; do I need to give a popcorn flick like Megamind intense scrutiny?  No, I do not.  But that’s not to say that my experience wouldn’t be improved by giving it everything I have.  There are jokes I’m doubtlessly missing, little character reactions that are sailing right by me, nuances even in a kid’s flick that I’m just not absorbing. It’s lessened.
And while sure, I technically could drop everything to watch it on my screen at home, as I said: there’s something meditative about the theater for me.  I was trained by my parents that this is a special place to be, fall silent, let the film take you where it wants to go.  And so, out of instinct, I do.  I feel no urge to text in a theater, no worry that I have interesting emails awaiting me.  When the credits roll and it’s all over, I’m seizing for my cell phone – WHAT’D I MISS? – but for that time period, I am lost in a spell.  A wonderful spell.
The current generation won’t have that.  They live in an environment of constant distraction, of noises, of games to play and attentions to be split.  And that’s not a bad thing!  I live in that world, most of the time.  My iPhone’s a constant distraction, and it’s wonderful, never being bored, always having something to read or play or listen to.  But that never-ending cavalcade of Things To Do means that I’m not able to sink into everything a movie has to offer me.
I’m lucky.  I got to have this perfect moment of silence for a while, absorbed in bliss.  The next generation won’t, and I’m not sure they’ll know what they’re missing.  And the idea of going out to a movie will slowly disappear as the mild inconvenience it is, and the attention paid to most media will dwindle, and it’ll be close but not the same.
I’m enough of a realist that I can’t fault this.  I know it’s what my grandparents doubtlessly said about me watching the television, not appreciating the outdoors.  And I live a pretty good life, even if I can’t just sit on my back porch and watch the tides come in and out, like they did.
Still, they had something that I don’t.  And it was something peaceable that kept them going well, a form of appreciation I never had but sometimes feel the ache of.  And so it goes.

I Just Can't Process My Own Death

Today, Gini and I watched UP.  And when that heartbreaking first seven minutes were over, where we see a relationship bloom and literally die before our eyes, Gini was weepier than usual.  I cleared off the couch next to me, and she came over and held me tight, weeping.
“I’m glad that wasn’t me,” she said.
And yeah.  It’s been about six months since the triple-bypass, and I’m still not conversant with death.  I know it’ll happen, of course; I didn’t used to.  Oh, if you’d asked me, I would have said, “Sure, I know I’ll die!”  And in some dimly teenaged fashion I did comprehend it intellectually.
But there I was, living with Gini, disinfecting a beer-brewing kit in the tub, and I suddenly thought: you don’t think they’re really going to develop immortality in your lifetime, do you?  And sure enough, I didn’t. Which led to the thought that if they weren’t going to perfect it, at some point, death was on the menu for me, and I felt that mortality all the way to the root of my heart. These muscles would fail, these thoughts all gone, this unique spot disappeared.
I started blogging not soon after. I think it’s my way of leaving a record for somebody.
Yet there I was, facing death, and it didn’t bother me all that much.  I was scared, sure, but the end would be soon for me.  Either I’d be proven right about an afterlife, or I would never know, and I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I’m pretty good at coping with non-negotiables.  If that wasn’t an option, well, it’s not like I could argue.  And so I went into surgery, not knowing if I’d wake up.
I dunno.  My friend Lady said that my recovery from the surgery was brave.  “Some people freeze,” she said.  “They give in.  You fought.”  And I guess, but I don’t know how else to be.  I was on the brink, and it doesn’t scare me.
Maybe because there’s another layer to go.  Maybe there’s yet some other layer where you process death even more tangibly, and that’s what PTSD is.  I don’t think we as humans can really process our own mortality this far away from it; Jay Lake can, but then again he’s in a situation where he has to, being terminal and all.  And you can see it corroding him, even from a distance.  Me?  I’m skipping over the surface like a stone hurled over a lake, and I’m just fine with that.
I think daily of Gini’s loss, though.  That’s how I process death; not the emptiness, but loss.  Sometimes I have nightmares of losing her, the greatest love of a damned lucky life, and I wonder what I’d do if that happened.
I’m still blessed, in a way.  If one of us had to have a brush with death, I got the easy end.  She gets to envision that life much clearer.
My job is to make that not happen.

Exciting Kickstarter Things! I Am Even In Some Of Them.

So if you haven’t been paying attention to the What Fates Impose Kickstarter – the one with my “a woman reads the future through Facebook posts” tale Black Swan Oracle in it – it’s about two-thirds of the way funded.  But two-thirds is not all the way, so they’ve been ramping up the rewards – there are new prizes with beautiful art from the exceptionally talented editor Nayad Monroe, and free paperbacks.  They’re kicking out the jams, here.
In addition, Nayad interviewed me for her blog, and so if you’ll click this link you can hear me tell you how my robotic vaccuum cleaner Opposite Cat directly inspired this tale.  It’s a weirdie origin story for a short story, even by my standards.  (There’s also a very good interview with Nayad herself over here.)
Don’t forget, for a mere $15, you can not only get the book, but get an MP3 of me doing a dramatic reading of the tale.  I intend to do A Performance.  So hey, a cheap deal to hear a Ferrett flail about.
And if you’re sick about hearing of me, then listen to Mike Allen.  Mike’s a very talented editor as well, having assembled the well-reviewed Clockwork Phoenix series, which have some beautiful tales contained therein.  Now he’s rebirthing his old poetry magazine Mythic Delirium (which, okay also has fiction), and he’s got his usual killer lineups of some of the best poets in spec fic on the chopping block for your entertainment.  Mike has exceptional tastes (oh, how I burn to one day get into one of his collections!), so if you’re at all interested in good poetry and lyrical stories, donate the moolah.

New Story! By Me! "Shadow Transit," At Buzzy Mag

I wrote this story because I do not know how to play with children.
I was, however, spending time with my um-daughter Carolyn, so named because her parents are Jewish and don’t have a tradition of Godchildren, but we’re pretty much her Godparents.  And she was playing “Teacher” with me.
Carolyn is creative at the best of times, but at this stage in her life she was very big on broken bones and operations.  Every time we played, someone shattered a femur or was in a cast.  And Carolyn, like all children, gets a bit tyrannical when handed the power of teachers, and was barking orders at me of what I was to do, and the awful injuries that might occur if I didn’t obey.  And I wondered: is her school like this at all?  Is she making all of this up, or is this some weird reflection of a hideously overprotective class? 
Then: what would it be like if her school really was full of terror? 
And so I wrote Shadow Transit, a story devoted to how impenetrable the inner lives of children are… especially when they’re special children, tasked with saving the world from otherworldly forces.  Here’s your obligatory sample:

Last night’s blizzard had choked the roads, leaving the cabinet factory short-handed for the Friday shift. So Michelle’s boss had called to give her a choice: she could come in for an emergency shift today and keep her job, or she could keep the day off she’d requested to visit her daughter at Shadow Transit, in which case she’d get her ass fired.
“Thank you,” Michelle whispered, glad beyond belief. “I’ll come in. Just…call them for me? Please? I’ll give you the number; they won’t listen to me. Make sure they tell Elizabeth that Mommy’s sorry.”
Jackson made his apologies, saying how he was sure Lizzie was needed wherever she was, but he had quotas to meet. Michelle barely heard him. She felt the giddy relief of a kid hearing that school was cancelled. Her boss had made the choice for her; she didn’t have to play with Lizzie this month and pretend that everything was okay. No three-hour drive out to the Colander. No watching teenaged guards struggling to remember how to pronounce English words. No worrying about what Lizzie had meant for days afterwards. She was free for another month and hated herself only a little for it….

But I should warn you: this is one of those stories that builds.  It’s one of my best finishes, I think.  I’d get all the way to the end if I were you, and make sure your children aren’t too close when you’re done.

The Awesome Thing That Happened On My Birthday

This first test was HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL. More needs to be done, but this?  Abut 80% of what I wanted.