Life after death.
An excerpt from This American Life’s “Life After Death” episode:
Darin Strauss does indeed have a new book out, More Than It Hurts You.
A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.
An excerpt from This American Life’s “Life After Death” episode:
Darin Strauss does indeed have a new book out, More Than It Hurts You.
This is a retort—the best kind of retort—to Jeff Bone’s “Haskell is like ‘that girl’,” as seen first on reddit.
She knew there were girls before her. Flashy girls—flashy for their time anyway—who were all pizazz and flesh, possessing neither substance nor soul. To her credit, C forgave you, which was more than anybody in the world had done. You quit those popular girls that got around with everybody sooner or later, the ones whose names were written in all capital letters. Some even remembered your name as you broke up with them.
As you replaced the receiver for that last entry in your little black database table, you felt the click in your soul. The one of loneliness, crazy regret, and echoes. Echoes of “Did I do the right thing?” “Am I with the right person?” Penniless and broke, you ran on the pure fuel C’s forgiveness. You lived because she was there when nobody else was. You beat those demons back. With a tempest and a hiss, they capitulated and went away in some dark recess of your soul.
A decade went by and then another. It was the 90s. Girls dressed more provocatively than ever before. Those demons, always prodding your conscience for ever-beautiful hairline cracks, came back. When you got home to kiss your wife C and she kissed back, you started flinching. She realized that you changed first, and it broke her in a way she never showed it for fear they would break her. She believed in you, and sadly she thought belief was all you needed. She knew you would do the right thing.
But you broke, and her forgiveness and patience followed her heart and broke too. “New problems require new solutions,” you told yourself before drowning in the liquor, the excess, the automated memory management, and the string of never-ending girls willing to turn a trick for a cheap buck—Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, D, Erlang. Or if you were short on cash, you’d flag down a shell language and have your way. You stopped looking at your wife in the eyes; it was the only way to ignore her gentle, silent pleas. You ignored the ways she tried to change: C89, C90, C99, C1x. So you packed your briefcases and one day you never came home from work. If you had, you would’ve seen C sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the kiss on the cheek that would never come …
… a strange scene lit by the fluorescent light that would never drive away the darkness.
According to herpes commercials (herpescials), people believe they can’t spread this hilarious disease between outbreaks—abstinence-only education at work. I didn’t know the “I can’t see it, therefore it’s not there” mentality still exists. How do people even believe they have herpes in the first place? You know why atoms were so hard to adopt, why there was resistance to using soap to kill germs, why major scientific discoveries had to fight for acceptance? It was because of people like you. And now you have herpes. That’s how countless centuries of science get their revenge: Herpes. It’s ingenious, really. It’s not fatal (thanks to science—clearly intentional), but it is terribly humorous.
Mary Jane gets jealous of Peter’s success. That’s right, Peter. He is possibly the nicest and nerdiest interpretation of a superhero ever, whose success manages to offend Mary Jane. She questions her love, thus compounding Spider-Nerd’s problems, thus putting his life in mortal danger. Along the way, the movie touches on every other cliché not yet employed in this subplot. Also: nobody bleeds; Harry chooses to be near Mary Jane’s bosom and die rather than call an ambulance; you can talk audibly even if a monster pierces both your lungs; Spider-Nerd’s rib cage is invincible; you can survive a grenade explosion two inches from your face with minimal reconstructive surgery; women will predictably scream in large numbers every time something—usually glass—breaks; you can take your kids out to watch a highly dangerous battle between monstrous freaks; gravitational acceleration is 9.8 meters per second squared for the first three seconds before falling to zero; and an invincible monster will rampage your city when all he really wants is forgiveness. Having watched this and Bones in the same week, I think I’ve reached my capacity for bad writing (and I still have to read over this week’s Dark Balloon posts).