The Damned Lies Project

The titular world in The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman is similar in many ways to the United States in the eighteenth century.  The East is a place of cities, universities, learning, and clearly defined things.  But the West is a frontier of lawlessness, small towns, philosophical movements, gunslingers and railroads.  But it is not our world.  Towns have different names and it has been in this state for centuries.  The West is more than just lawless; at the farthest frontier reality itself is ill-defined and strange.  The Folk roam the land, strange and mysterious, unable to die.  But by far, the main difference is the centuries old war between the Gun and the Line. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein three friends take drugs and start a trip that will change the world… or not.

Basquiat typically received his drugs by mail.  This sounds stupid, but it was true.  He’d receive Fedex deliveries of a sheet or two of paper with some art on it.  Each sheet was already dipped in acid, so he’d simply cut up the sheets and sell each small square as a single hit of acid.  I don’t know who sent them or how that relationship was set up; sometimes it was better not to ask.

During the height of my brief drug career, he got something a little different.  Instead of sending a sheet, he had gotten them to send the liquid itself.  Why they changed it up, I was never sure – I think he just was curious and wanted to try the liquid himself.  We weren’t bold enough to actually drink the liquid – the amount of liquid needed for a typical hit was miniscule.  Besides a mere overdose, there were other dangers: acid can be absorbed through any mucous membrane.  So spill it on your hand and touch your nose, mouth, etc and you could get more than you bargained for.  No, he took the liquid and dipped his own sheets.  But I was part of the experiment he was conducting – what was freshly dipped acid like?  Acid sheets lost their potency over time, so the question was, how powerful was a sheet that was freshly dipped? Read the rest of this entry »

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are two iconic characters in the history of fantasy.  Before Lord of the Rings, before Elric, before Jordan, Eddings, Goodkind, Martin or the others there were these two rogues and the dirty city of Lankhmar.  Fafhrd is a tall blond barbarian from the North.  The Grey Mouser is a shorter, slimmer man, skilled with his rapier and a minor amount of magic.  They are rogues, thieves, swashbucklers and adventurers.  Rather than being the larger-than-life of Conan, they are closer to real men.  They banter back and forth as they steal, slay monsters, drink, and flirt with women.  Created by author Fritz Leiber, they are the most notable characters of fantasy that modern readers may have never heard of. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I write a post that will probably get me on some watch list somewhere

It was in college that I experimented with drugs.  College is the typical time for this stuff.  I have a certain distrust of someone who doesn’t admit to experimenting with something during college.  Surely they tried something, they just won’t admit it, which is provokes the distrust.  Come on, just be forthright and admit you experimented with girl drinks until your banana daiquiri habit got out of control and you had the Great Girl Drink Detox of ’97.

This is not to say that I was using hard drugs.  I was no Burroughsian junky staring at their shoes for hours on end before riding around for a fix.  I put as many hats on the bed as I wanted, I wasn’t so poor I had to do anything for a fix, my classes did not suffer, and I had a life outside drug use.  It was just something to make the weekends interesting.

Primarily, I tried acid, aka LSD.  Oh yeah, I tried marijuana like every other college student who didn’t have a stick up their ass the size of Gibraltar, but I didn’t like it.  It gave me a headache and made me tired.  Phish fans who got excited at the title of this post – suck it, we’re not serving your kind here.  King Crimson fans – thanks for stopping by, please stay awhile. Read the rest of this entry »

A secret international conspiracy of anarchists is threatening the world.  To combat that, a new intellectual force of British police is created to infiltrate the anarchist conspiracy.  Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited for this police force.  Through a strange course of events, he is able to infiltrate the local anarchist group and is elected to the post of Thursday.  With his new title, he is sent to the top-level anarchist gathering.  There he meets five other anarchists, each under the names of the days of the week.  The group is led by a massive and mysterious man known only as Sunday.  They plan an atrocious act of anarchism for the following weekend, then disperse, leaving Syme to somehow stop this plot before it happens.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesteron is a strange surrealist novel of identities.  All the anarchists are told that the most perfect way to disguise themselves is to disguise themselves as anarchists.  Most people who call themselves anarchists are full of bluster but no bite, and the world at large accepts them with a mocking smile when out of sight.  Those that try to hide themselves, find that their secretive ways and plans tend to attract the most notice.  People are worried about a secret anarchist but not a public one.  So to hide as the most perfect anarchist is to discuss it openly, as Sunday’s group does on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking a busy square under full observation of waiters.  But this starts the almost schizophrenic chain of identities.  Syme is a poet who is a police man who is disguised as an anarchist who is pretending to be an anarchist among other anarchists.  Things get even more confusing when he hunts down one of his fellow members of the week to find out he is also a police agent pretending to be an anarchist… Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we try the dance club thing again, a cute girl falls through my grasp, and a night ends poorly.

Ohms was a bigger club than Proteus.  Of course, club size was relative in the Sixth Street area; space was a premium, so no club was really huge.  But Ohms had a big dance floor, a few times the size of Proteus’s.  The club on a whole was darker, leaving more illusion to the actual size of the club and the actual attractiveness of the other club goers.  Add into that the requisite dance club dynamic lighting and copious amounts of alcohol, I was surprised people actually knew if they were going home with someone of the same species.

Our stomachs full of greasy but still unappetizing pizza (“Dude, chill.  Let the pizza go,” said Trent), we resumed our drinking in debauch in this new club.  There were three bars in Ohms.  A long one that stretched the length of the dance floor, an outdoor bar for their tables out back, and a shorter one near the random arrangements of old couches where we found ourselves.  I remember looking at the couches, trying to peer through the darkness, colored dance lighting, and smoke, wondering if I’d ever sit in these couches if I saw them in the light of day.  Trent suggested the same might be said of some of the girls at these clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone has stolen Croggon’s airship.  He has an idea of who, but he doesn’t know why.  As he pursues the ship east across the United States, he finds that his beloved Free Crow has been renamed the Clementine.  He has no clue what cargo they stole his ship to transport, but he knows that they keep moving east towards the Civil War still waging between North and South.  He would be unwelcome with either side, but the South has a death warrant since he escaped his slavery in a bloody way all those years ago.

As if the pursuit of his ship were not enough, he is also being pursued by the newest member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Maria Isabella Boyd is an actress and former spy that has been marginalized and pushed out of employment by her beloved Confederacy.  She is given orders to make sure that the Clementine’s cargo arrive at its destination no matter the cost. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein a pontificate about pizza with unrepentant snobbery.

I admit that I’m a pizza snob.

No defenses, no conditions or suppositions, no backpeddling to make you think I’m even handed.  Nope.  I grew up in New York eating pizza nearly once a week for eighteen years.  There’s just a way pizza needs to be done.  It needs to be handed to you on a paper plate that has ruffled fringes on the ends for no more than a buck or two, often paired with a soft drink special.  You carry a single slice (because that’s enough for lunch) back to booth-style seating where they have a salt shaker full of powdered garlic, another shaker filled with red pepper flakes, and a metal napkin dispenser at the table.

Don’t get me started about Chicago style deep dish pizza.  I acknowledge that it is also called pizza, but I think of it as some other type of pizzeria culinary cuisine, like it’s some sort of tomato-covered calzone.  I sleep better at night that way.

Moving down to Austin was a rude awakening for my inner pizza critic.  My first observation was that the pizza shrunk in the wash.  It wasn’t just thinner or smaller on a single dimension, the entire pie was shrunken and pieces carved off of that.  Where in New York the expectation is that a slice or two would satisfy you (unless you were binging), in Austin a single person was expected to consume three to four of these mini slices for something resembling satisfaction.  I guess you could consider Texas pizza the sliders of the pizza genre.  I just considered it bad. Read the rest of this entry »

You know the old story.  Boy meets girl.  Boy hooks up with girl.  Girl vanishes into thin air the next morning.  Boy finds out girl died weeks earlier.  Girl is trapped in a purgatory like Limbo where she can only visit the land of the living twice a year.  Yet the love story persists. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I go downtown with friends and witness a chilling event.

Those with some passing familiarity with Austin have heard of Sixth Street.  Not the street itself, but all it encompasses.  Even if you had not heard of it, when you move to Austin as a college student, you hear about it pretty quickly.

“So there’s an area downtown where there are like a hundred bars and clubs in a few block area.  Literally bars next door to other bars.  And most of them are playing live music or have dance music.  So you can just walk from one bar to the next as you like.  And there are girls all over, hopping from bar to bar, typically dressed for clubbing.”

“Where is this mystical paradise that you speak of?  How soon can I go there and how much of my soul will it cost me?” Read the rest of this entry »