#she quite literally refuses to go more than 5 minutes without laying on a human

[tonytoponi]

like literally what am i supposed to do. my cat is 17 years old and all she wants to do is lay on me and sleep. i try and make her sleep on my bed and two minutes later she is standing on her hind legs next to my chair tapping me on the arm with her sad wet eyes begging to be held

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

Once Bitten, Twice Stupid prt 128

128

Lance had snapped. Being tired and hungry did that to a man. He’d hit the point of exhaustion where he’d gone over and lost the plot... Lotor held him down as Ezor stuck her arm in his mouth. Her blood tasted gross, forced down his throat until he had the strength to get free... Then had kind of lost it over everything. He’d tried to rip the door off its hinges, hands burnt because of it. His temper tantrum stopped by Lotor, but the damage was done and he was moved from the others. With his ego beyond his ability to rein it back in, it’d taken five vampires to hurl him away from his friends, earning him a black eye and a broken nose... yet a nicer room, despite the fact he promised to behave himself if they just put him back with the others. He hadn’t even seen Curtis as friend once the blood started flowing into his mouth. Everyone had just been a source of food, with his ego being okay with that.

Dragged through what Lance now knew to be a house and not some kind of warehouse, he chained to a bed by his feet and his wrists, a collar around his neck with chain linking to the chain between his wrists. The bars of the bed groaning with his strength, yet refused to yield under his force. Hit by the full realisation of what he’d done, he’d curled up the best he could around his chains, crying himself to sleep over how violent he’d been.

He’d been in the bedroom for a few days now. Away from the others they brought him food. Human food that did nothing for his blood cravings, and blood capsules that he’d forced himself to swallow down so his body was at least getting some form of blood. The other vampires seemed wary of him now. Despite being able to take him in his weakened state, they came in a group of five. Two would guard the door, one would throw his food on the bed, one was armed with a cattle prod and another with what Lance could only call a dog catching pole. The steel comprising the loop was no joke. It’d been wrapped with razor wire that he was sure would decapitate him if they felt he was misbehaving.

Next to the bed was a bucket, Lance barely had enough chain to roll over to use it, resulting in him messing up his clothes and the bed, not that his captors cared. He was permitted one 5 minute bathroom break a day, where the was observed for the whole thing and Mr Cattle-Prod would stand right up near him with the device hovering near his back. He’d make the mistake of moving too fast to grab toilet paper and had been dropped by the device so fast he’d smacked his head on the toilet. Still, Lance hoped for all his mistreatment that they hadn’t laid a hand on Curtis. Zethrid, Acxa, and Ezor all fell under Lotor’s protection. Curtis had no one now. He bitterly cursed his outburst and attempt to escape when they’d come to subdue him. Had he kept his head level, he wouldn’t have been taken from his friend.

This waiting thing sucked. All sorts of thoughts coming to mind. Their captors were careful. He hadn’t caught a whiff of Sendak’s scent, nor was his name mentioned. Nothing important was mentioned at all... so all he had time for was his own thoughts. Like if he’d ever see Keith again, or if he was destined to die... or if Lotor had been lying and in on it all, with this whole thing being a charade or an attempt to extract information from him. He didn’t know how to feel. He really missed Keith, but he missed his Mami in a whole other way. Coran would be taking care of her, yet Coran had nothing to say that could reassure her. Lotor had left VOLTRON instead of doing all he could to help there, where his help would have been more appreciated and they could have all been out of here by now. Sleeping was the only time he could relax... forced to deal with the cuts and scraped around his ankles and wrists if he moved too much.

He was never going to complain about Keith hogging all the blankets again. Nor was he going to complain about his boyfriend’s inability to human before coffee, not that it really sucked. Keith was too unbelievably cute as he stumbled around seeking cuddles and guidance. Lance was as scared as he was tired, and frustrated that he wasn’t strong enough to withstand this forced captivity. Keith would be strong. He’d be quiet, brooding, until he worked out how get himself free. He wouldn’t go around having tantrums. He would have figured out how to get the cuffs off by now. Lance had tried to channel Keith and pick the locks with his nails. All that’d happened was he’d chipped them. Biting them broke his teeth. He was quite certain his captures thought him insane. He was acting insane.

There was only so much he could do chained down to a bed. Thanks to his little outburst he didn’t even know the way back down to the basement, so if he did break out, he’d be caught without being able to do anything for the others. Fuck. He’d even take being locked up with Lotor for the company over his own thoughts... yeah, he really was going insane... but... if Lotor actually helped him... No. Nope. No. It’d been days locked up in the room with nothing. He didn’t even bother trying to initiate conversation knowing he’d be abused if he did. Had Lotor planned something then surely things would have been in place and his arse would have been rescued by now.

*

Keith was not above torture. He wasn’t the saint Lance made him out to be... but his friends were literally the only thing he had left now that he’d been sent down to the VOLTRON staff quarters. Isolated for his own good. What a load of shit. Shiro was still in the briefing room, where he should be... not sent to rest like a little kid when he could sleep perfectly fine in a chair beside Shiro

Hearing a knock on the door to his room, Keith very nearly called out to tell them to fuck off, before remembering the rooms were sound proof and he’d actually have to face whoever was on the other side of the day. He was supposed to be resting. How could when Lance had been gone six days now and Shiro had been working his arse off for the last 4? Dragging his body off the bed, he rubbed at his tired eyes. Sleep hadn’t been his friend. He’d slept when Shiro slept because he’d believed Shiro was okay and he thought maybe with his brother back in action they would have located Lance by now.

Hearing the soft knock again, it irritated him. Striding over he flung the door open to find Miriam standing on the other side. Shit. Yeah. He hadn’t been the best person around, and he definitely wasn’t winning any awards when it came to checking up on Mami. With her standing in front of him, he didn’t know what to say. Both of them staring at each other before Mami gave him a sad smile

“Oh, my poor boy”

Shuffling forward, Keith tensed as Mami wrapped her arms around him. The last person to hug him had been his brother. Mami was tiny in comparison. Her head coming up to his chest

“M-Mami?”

“I’m glad you remember who I am. I’d be very sad if you forgot me”

Way to make him feel even shittier about himself

“What are you doing here?”

“Call it an old woman’s hunch. I thought you could use some company”

No. He really couldn’t... but he couldn’t say no to Miriam. Mami squeezed him tight before moving her hands to grip Keith’s arms lightly

“Ah... I can hear your thoughts my boy. Don’t you worry, this old bird came bearing gifts”

Keith didn’t know when Mami had the chance to cook, only that she’d brought food down to him. The bag left by the doorway when she’d shuffled in for a hug. Opening the bag, everything smelt delicious, until he caught sight of a certain bottle

“Mami!”

Mami chuckled. He supposed he sounded how Lance did when he was scolding her. The bottle of vodka wasn’t full. Mami was definitely some kind of grandma rebel

“That’s to share. I know you haven’t been taking care of yourself. Lance would have kicked you into the shower by now. My nose might just fall off”

Okay. Maybe he hadn’t showered in a little while...

“My mind’s been elsewhere”

“On our Lance. I heard about what happened with our Shiro and the others. He wouldn’t want you letting yourself go like this. Now, there’s some soap in the bag, I want you take a nice warm shower, and I’ll get dinner organised”

How was Miriam so composed? Her youngest was missing. Possibly being tortured and she... was there. With dinner, alcohol and an ungodly amount of patience. Keith found himself questioning her good intentions. He’d let her son be stolen away. Lance wasn’t back and he was... being useless. He wanted to scream. He wanted to drag in as many vampires as he could and force them to tell him where Lance was. He was acting like the Keith he’d used to be. The Keith who had nothing to lose.

“Why? Why are you here?”

“Because my boy, it breaks my heart to see you suffering”

She had to be suffering too... He had no right to

“But Lance is your son...”

“And he’s your boyfriend. Our Lance is strong. He’d be broken hearted to see the man he loved in so much pain. I have faith that our boy will come back to us. Now off to the shower with you. I had to pull many strings to sneak away from Krolia. Woman was giving me more grey hairs with her worrying than I know what to do with”

Lance probably thought he’d given up on him. He wouldn’t rest if their roles were reversed. How could he look his boyfriend in the eye?

“Do you... do think Lance will still love me?”

Miriam chuckled at him, Keith feeling self conscious knowing she was laughing at him

“My boy. That son of mine is absolutely crazy for you. Always talks my ear off about you. He says your very stubborn, but very sensitive. He’s always at me not to tease you because he doesn’t want you be sad. He adores you. Gracious, you’re as bad as my boys, you need to take a shower, mister. I can’t let Lance be seeing you like this. He’d scold me for not taking care of you”

Heading to shower, the warm water hid his tears. Keith letting everything go as he cried out how much he missed his boyfriend. He missed his whole existence. The sleepy smiles as they lay cuddled up in bed together. The way he knew Keith needed his morning coffee and let him hang off him until he was caffeinated. The way he was the dorkiest and clumsiest vampire in existence. He felt like his soul had been cut in half and he didn’t know how to exist on his own after finding love with Lance. Trying to stay strong was exhausting. Nothing was going right and no one would give him his boyfriend back. He had Lance’s clothes but he feared if he handled them too much they stop smelling like him... and then he’d have nothing anymore. Keith already felt like he was forgetting what it felt like to hold him. To hear his voice.

Cried out and much cleaner, Keith climbed out the shower slowly. The warm water left him in a state ready to pass out in bed. Without a change of clothes he put on what he’d been wearing before, having to admit that he’d definitely been past due for a shower. Lance really would be kicking his arse for how he was acting. He was 27. He needed to be an adult... no matter how much everything hurt right now. Shiro would... Shiro would work this out... and Lance and Curtis would come home. Lance would tell him off for being a wreck, but Keith wouldn’t care because his boyfriend would be back and those who took him would have paid for it... slowly. Torturously slowly.

Heading back into the bedroom area, Mami had dinner all organised. She’d even had someone smuggle in two small glasses for the vodka. Drinking would change nothing. It’d only serve to make him more depressed, but one drink wouldn’t hurt, it might even take the edge off enough to finally rest

“You smell fresh as a daisy. Dig in, you need your strength”

He smelt like Mami. The soap that Lance always went to such trouble to buy because he knew she loved it. He wanted more times like that. More times of watching Lance fuss over Miriam with love in his eyes. The way Mami was looking at him... like... like she loved him, hurt

“Uh... thanks. I... know I’ve been a terrible partner to Lance... and I’ve neglected you...”

“Hush yourself. Lance is going to be found. I’ve seen enough airport security television to know he’s not getting through a cargo detector with those racing heartbeats of my grandbabies”

Keith hadn’t thought of things like that. The image of an irate Lance stuffed in a suitcase came to mind. His boyfriend would be so fucking pissed. Still, there were other avenues open if someone really wanted out of the country. Miriam seemed almost naive to think Sendak would waltz into a public airport and fly away to Zarkon’s territory. nearly half a moment later he realised that was the lie Mami was telling herself to keep going on strong. She had to believe Lance would come back, because the only other option was her son was dead... again. Keith wouldn’t believe that until he saw Lance for himself.

“Now, let’s have a good meal and a few drinks, then you’ll get yourself some much needed sleep”

Krolia had tried to be there for him... but she was better off being where she could be useful and not chained to his side. He was lashing out. Moody. Desperate for any kind of news and angry the Blades hadn’t found something despite all their work

“Thanks, Mami. I... don’t know how you can be so kind to me. It’s my fault he’s missing”

“Don’t you say that. Those people who took him are to blame. You’re not the one who abducted him. And if you are, I’m very cross at you”

“I wish I was... then we’d know where he is”

“I suspect he wouldn’t think of it as an abduction if it was you. He’d probably skip away merrily with a smile on his face”

“Probably. He’s kind of hopeless”

“He’s also lived a long time. He’ll be back home sooner rather than later. Now, eat your dinner. You can tell me everything you know while we eat. Lance often says I give good advice”

Keith resisted rolling his sore eyes at Miriam. She was so fierce and gentle... Lance would probably be the same with their twins. Fierce, gentle, and paranoid about dropping the baby... As for the whole “advice thing”, Miriam really did give good advice. He really should be going into detail, but this was Lance’s mother. She looked at things completely different to him and everyone else around them. She had a unique kind of “inside outside” view of the situation... There wasn’t much to be lost if he talked to her... he’d just have to leave out the scarier bits

“Yes, Mami”

He and Mami shouldn’t have been left unsupervised with the vodka. One more glass turned to two more. Keith’s tongue getting away from him as he spilled too much about how all of this was making him feel. With his defences down, he could have talked to Mami all night. She held his hand, rubbing her thumb over the back of his hand like Lance would. She filled in so many parts of Lance’s life as “their little secret”. The parts of his childhood that were happy felt every bit the distant memories they were. Lance learning to drive had to be his new favourite story. His boyfriend overcompensating for his sense, driving so slow Mami smacked him until he crashed into a stop sign... then freaked out. Noticing she’d gone missing, Krolia came to find her. Eyeing the glasses on the desk, his mother raised an eyebrow, Keith feeling ashamed for actually finally relaxing and talking to someone about what he was feeling. Things were different now. He knew Krolia cared for him, but trauma didn’t disappear and he felt weak for relying on Mami when she had enough on her plate.

“Do I need to seperate you two? Or ask who was leading who astray here?”

Miriam laughed softly at Krolia, maybe his mum wasn’t as cranky as he was mentally making her out to be

“Don’t blame, Mami”

“So she’s the culprit. Leading my son astray, whatever shall I do with you?”

Mami smiled at Krolia

“You could sit and have a drink with us?”

“I only came to make sure you two hadn’t snuck out. Pidge tried to. Matt’s decided she needed rest and has sent to her to sleep”

Mami nodded, abandoning her glass in favour of placing her other hand over Keith’s

“Ah, perhaps it’s that time. Keith, you should rest too, my mijo”

He still felt self conscious... and kind of didn’t want Mami to leave. Hearing about Lance was nice. The kid that loved soccer and dancing...

“What about you?”

“When you get to my age, you can just about sleep anywhere”

That wasn’t what he meant. He kind of felt Mami shouldn’t be alone either

“Do... you want to stay?”

“I’m flattered by the offer, but can you imagine how jealous Lance would be? If I was 30 years younger I’d eat you up”

Krolia covered her mouth as she snorted at Miriam, before composing herself into “mum mode”. Keith hoped he hadn’t offended her by asking Mami to stay instead of her. He’d just... Krolia had her son and knew where he was. Mami didn’t. She was old and... He didn’t know what he’d tell Lance if anything happened to her. He hated Luis with a burning passion, but he wanted someone with Mami. He wanted someone there to take care of her and make sure she wasn’t pushing herself

“Miriam’s right. You need to sleep, we can all see it. We’ll wake you if we learn anything, and I won’t be making a move without consulting you first. It’s hard to have hope, but all we can do is trust in Lance and Curtis to do what they have to do until we can bring them home. Matt’s heading down to Garrison tomorrow to collect a few things for Rieva and pick up Blue. Maybe you could go with him? Or make a list of things that Lance would like to come back to? Oh... I’ve got this back too... I know it’s customary to keep evidence, but I felt like you should have it”

Krolia tossed something into Keith’s lap. Keith realising it was Lance’s phone. He hadn’t been allowed to keep it. Lance’s laptop was bagged as evidence when Pidge’s was retrieved from her parents... so he’d really thought he wouldn’t be allowed his boyfriend’s phone. Hitting the power button, the screen lit up. He was Lance’s background. Fast asleep with Kosmo curled up in his arms. Keith hated the photo because it was him, Lance loved it for that reason... his doggo no longer that tiny now he was 8 months old. Feeling himself growing teary. He really fucking missed Lance... Miriam squeezed his hand

“We’ll bring him home. You’ll see. Krolia, can I tempt you into a nightcap?”

Krolia groaned playfully, before nodding

“Ooooh, you’ve twisted my arm. One when we get back to your room. You’re a terrible influence on me”

Mami cackled. Maybe Krolia could be the one who stayed by mami’s side. They got on so well, and Mami would have a protector by her side

“As I’ve been told. Keith, you get a good night rest. I’ll see you tomorrow. Remind me to tell you about the first time Lance tried to make dinner on his own when he was four. I’m sure that’s a story he’d never want repeated seeing he was naked”

Mami tapped the side of her nose mischievously. Keith kind of wanted to know that story, but he kind of really wanted to find some kind of video of he and Lance to watch on repeat until he fell asleep. He knew Lance had a habit of filming things... even when they didn’t turn out right and people were left headless in the frame

“Thanks, Mami... and thanks for coming to see me”

“You’re welcome, my sweet boy. Don’t forget you can talk to me about anything”

“I know... I just... yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“That you will. Not too bright and early though, need to put my makeup on and my teeth in... You never know when you’re going to need to bite someone”

Mami sounded like Pidge, but Pidge wished she’d grow up to be as badarse

“Right, that’s enough you two. Keith, don’t stay up too late. I’ll know if you are and take that phone back”

Krolia could try. She wouldn’t get very far. He had Lance’s phone and that was the closest thing he had to his boyfriend right now. He wasn’t going to invade Lance’s privacy. He trusted his boyfriend and his emails and messages were his private business. His photos though... those were fair game.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Timeless Top Ten: Badass Moments

Buckle up kiddos, because @timeless-season-three comes back in just twelve days! That’s Jan 13, 8/7 central! And what better way to ring in the new year and celebrate the first half of the season than by remembering the most badass moments so far? So here they are--the top ten moments that had us fist-pumping and cheering at our computer screens!

10. Future Wyatt lays it out for Present Wyatt. While our present puppy, Wyatt, has been making a real mess of the carpet all of season two, his future self seems to have things figured out. In 3x01, Chinatown Part II, he sticks it to his past self and gives Wyatt some good advice about Wyatt’s current situation. It’s clear this older version of Wyatt has seen a lot of shit and isn’t about to put up with any more BS, even from himself. And frankly, how many of us would like the chance to go back about five years and smack our younger selves around a little? His appearance was short but Future Wyatt, you badass, we hope our present puppy turns out like you.

Except maybe without the beard. Honey. Honey. No.

9. Lucy goes Dark Side. It’s a fine line between badass and terrifying, and Lucy’s been walking that line a lot this season. From shooting Julius Rosenberg and trying to shoot Emma right after in 3x04 to deciding that they’re going to take the fight to Emma no matter what the consequences in 3x07, Lucy’s shaping up to be a real badass. Let’s just hope that it’s not at the cost of her compassion and humanity.

8. Houdini takes the shot for Lucy. Houdini is our absolute favorite and we are currently in the process of applying to adopt him, but let’s face it, he’s not the rough and ready type. Which is why in 3x06 The Tsarevich it’s even more badass when he jumps in front of Emma’s gun and saves Lucy’s life—and risks his own—by taking the bullet meant for her.

7. “I’m expendable. You’re not.” In 3x07 Pasadena, Rittenhouse has found the bunker and are closing in with a strike team. With Denise and Lucy stranded there, Denise makes the ultimate sacrifice and tells Lucy to run, preparing to take on the strike team herself—knowing she won’t make it. While the Lifeboat fortunately arrives and swoops Lucy and Denise to safety in the nick of time, that moment reminds us why Denise is a true badass, willing to die for the cause and to protect her team.

6. “Somebody call an Uber?” Throughout the season we’ve seen the Lifeboat literally struggling to get back to the present as the timelines change, running off of a dying battery. But Rufus, Jiya, and Mason don’t let that stop them. These three quietly work throughout the season to guide the Lifeboat safely home, culminating in this moment: Rufus guiding the Lifeboat back in the nick of time to save Denise and Lucy in our midseason finale. It’s often the scientists working quietly in the background who save the day, and even if they don’t do it in a hail of bullets—that’s still pretty damn badass.

5. Rufus gets schooled. It’s okay Rufus, if I had the chance for MLK Jr. and Bayard Rustin to school me, I’d happily take it. In 3x02, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rufus is struggling with his place in the world and his existence in general after being brought back to life. Both MLK and Rustin—the latter a bit more firmly—give Rufus sound advice and their perspectives on why and how we fight for our rights. It’s just talking, sure, but badassery isn’t just waving a gun. It’s standing up for what you believe in and never backing down. In these moments we see why we so admire and honor these two men, because they’re nothing short of badass.

4. You don’t mess with the Notorious RBG. In 3x03, Michael Temple—the guy we all love to hate—has Ruth Bader Ginsberg hostage. But RBG is a badass and basically spits in his face when he tries to intimidate her. This is one woman the straight white male institution can’t take down, and when her life is saved she vows to dedicate the rest of it fighting men like Temple. Not once during her kidnapping does RBG lose her cool, or give into Temple’s mind games. We’re pretty sure the ‘B’ actually stands for ‘Badass’.

3. Flogan battle couple. In 3x07 Pasadena, the time team is held hostage by some Rittenhouse goons. Facing the possibility that one of them might not make it out of this, Wyatt apologizes to Flynn and calls him his “man in the foxhole,” telling Flynn he was right and Wyatt should’ve trusted him. This leads to the moment we’ve been waiting for since 1x10, as Flynn and Wyatt say ‘fuck it’ and launch themselves at the goons. When the mysterious Jane arrives to help, the two men investigate seamlessly, clearing the room and watching each other’s six. They’re the badass team we always knew they could be, even if just for a few minutes. Let’s hope this trend continues in the second half of the season.

2. “If you like.” In 3x05 The Lost Colony of Roanoke when Lucy refuses to tell John White what’s happened to his family, he threatens to kill her and the rest of the time team. In response, Lucy goes full badass and announces that she’s a witch who cursed all of Roanoke and its people and that she will curse White as well, if he and his men don’t leave. Flynn steps up as well, telling White and his men that if they want Lucy they’ll have to get through him, leading White to ask him, “Is that why you call yourself Marlowe? Marlowe, who wrote the great tragedy of Dr. Faustus, a man who sold his soul to the devil in pursuit of arcane knowledge? Are you that, then? Her familiar?”

Flynn’s response?

“If you like.”

It’s certainly enough to scare White and his men off. Flynn did say back in the pilot that he and Lucy would be quite the team someday, and we’re seeing that now in spades. They’re a couple of badasses in this moment.

So what, then, is our most badass moment? The one that had us swooning onto our fainting couches? Why that would be…

1. Taking over ground control. In 3x03 The Notorious RBG when Rufus and Flynn realize that Wyatt and Lucy are trapped on a plane headed for a collision, the two men don’t just wring their hands. They jump into action—especially Flynn. While Rufus smooth-talks the crew, Flynn takes over ground control and successfully guides the plane to safety, saving the lives of Wyatt and Lucy and also dozens of others. I think I had to take a cold shower after that one. Personification of badass.

[gamedadmatt]

The Chappie Rant

So some time ago I had a big old rant on Twitter about Chappie. I saw it fairly recently for the first time. Reason being is that I’ve been on something of an Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in film/novels/TV series kick. There’s been some really good things I’ve seen (I quite enjoyed Westworld), but Chappie easily takes the cake as one of the worst things I’ve seen.

If you don’t know what Chappie is, it’s a movie directed by Neil Blomkamp, the guy who also did District 9. District 9 is a good movie. It had plot holes, but it was generally enjoyable. Anyway. Chappie is a movie about a robot that gains sentience. "Robots? Philosophical questions about what sentience is? That sounds right up my alley right now!" I think to myself.

But it's misleading. Chappie is actually a movie that asks the question: "what if we made an entire movie based upon those few minutes in Short Circuit 2 where Johnny 5 becomes a gangster and cluelessly steals car radios."

Spoilers ahead, in case you actually want to watch this garbage. Because I'm basically going to lay the plot out for you. The whole plot. Because it’s worth doing to review how and why the movie is so bad.

Chappie starts by following the programmer (henceforth called Programmer Guy) of these robots that were designed to supplement the South African police force. They seem pretty damn effective, really. The company he works for is doing well and the robots look and move fantastically. It's a really promising start to the film.

One of the robots gets damaged and is marked to be dismantled because it's battery has fused to its chassis, making the entire chassis need replacement. Programmer Guy goes back home and continues a little hobby side project.

You know, just... Programming robotic sentience. NBD.

"Wow, okay. That's... a hell of a hobby side project" I think to myself, while squinting at Programmer Guy's dirty apartment, CRT screens and DOS-like interface. I squint even more as he starts slamming red bull. "Hm. This feels a little like the director may not quite understand programming and just be writing based on programmer tropes here."

Yes, past Matt. That is exactly what it is.

So of course Programmer guy successfully codes robotic sentience. We know he's successful because the DOS interface says so, and he gets very excited that the thing he programmed tells him he's made stable sentience... Okay.

So Programmer Guy rushes back to the company, and tries to sell his boss on giving the robots this sentience. "They'll be able to write poetry and paint!" He explains, excitedly.

"Dude, they're police robots. She's never going to buy that." I say. "Dude, they're police robots. No you can't make them write poetry." Boss lady says.

But of course, Programmer Guy is determined to see this god complex of his through to the very finish. He steals the damaged robot, the USB security key required to access the robots (seems a little bit insecure, but okay), and rushes off to go and install sentience onto it.

And then he gets attacked and taken hostage by gangsters.

Said gangsters are... actually kind of the real opener of the movie, but you won't care about them. They're running drugs or something for some other big important gangster (you can tell he's important because his gun is gold plated), but the cop robots fucked up their plans and Gold Plated Gun Gangster is pissed and wants money. So they decide to take Programmer Guy hostage and force him to make the cop robots work for them so they can do a heist.

I think. It’s all a little convoluted.

Anyway, Programmer Guy can't reprogram all the robots because it's not possible to do (even though somebody else does it later, but that’s just one of many plotholes). But he can reprogram this one bot to be sentient and it'll do what the gangsters say.

"Okay." Say the gangsters. "It only has 5 days to live though." Says Programmer Guy. "Cool." Says the gangsters.

Worst gangsters ever.

So the sentience is installed and Chappie is born. It freaks out in its first moments, cowering away from the humans.

"Does it understand English?" Asks one of the Gangsters. "Well of course it understands En--" "No, it doesn't understand English. Not yet. We’ll need to teach it." Programmer Guy says, interrupting my perfectly reasonable chain of thought.

This was my first big problem with the film. The basic police units are clearly able to understand and speak English. Probably other languages, too. But apparently to create sentience, this gets left out. It's an excuse to spend some cute moments connecting with Chappie as it learns to say important words like "chicken" and "shoe" and "this fuck mother talks ghetto huh?" Yes, that’s a quote from the film.

It also skips over the fact that the English language is complex, but Chappie picks up on some words and concepts without being taught them, and others... well, we'll get to that.

Anyway, Programmer Guy gets bulled by The Gangsters and runs off screaming about "his creation" and how they are all terrible people and how he'll be back. For a guy that created sentience, you'd think he'd show Chappie a bit more respect, but he really does spend a lot of the movie still treating Chappie like a 'thing'. Specifically, HIS ‘thing’.

Chappie starts getting trained in Gangster, but (without much prior learning or influence) decides it doesn't want to use guns. Programmer Guy returns and teaches Chappie to paint, but we don't really get to see the robot flex its apparent built in creativity as it just paints what it sees like a big robotic printer. Chappie also promises Programmer Guy that it will “not do any crimes”.

But Programmer Guy gets chased off by The Gangsters again, tucking tail and screaming once more about how they are awful people and how Chappie should embrace its creativity while he runs off.

The Gangsters are pissed that Chappie learned something other than Gangster, and so they dump their sentient robot out in the world to teach it a lesson about how the world is shit and it should be scared of humans (I guess?). In the process, it gets captured by Religious Australian Douchebag who also works at the company where Chappie was made. He saws Chappie's arm off (because he’s the bad guy) and takes the USB drive security key that Programmer Guy left plugged in to Chappie.

Chappie gets back to the Gangster’s hideout, beaten up by humans and with its arm missing. The Gangster's are really sorry, plug in a replacement arm, and get back to training Chappie in Gangster. It doesn't want to use guns, so instead the Gangsters train it in using throwing stars and knives because "they put people to sleep" and "it feels nice", lying to convince the Robot that it's not killing anybody. We'll get back to this, too.

Remember how I said that the robots looked and moved real nice? Well, forget that. Because now Chappie has been trained to move like it’s straight out of a gangster trope. One metal hand always towards its nonexistent junk. Another metal hand constantly wiping a nonexistent nose. Chappie is anything but endearing at this stage.

Programmer Guy meanwhile is getting pushed around by Religious Australian Douchebag at work. Religious Australian Douchebag has a rival project that he's trying to get the police force to buy - a giant war machine that has rockets and anti tank rounds and a chainsaw and anti air and... it’s overkill. The movie has characters point it out, too. Anyway, he's trying to get the police to buy it instead of the robots. But he's also terrified of robotic sentience.

It’s not explained why (because religious?) but it isn't really important until the end, anyway.

Chappie is out stealing cars from people with The Gangsters because they have convinced it that this is not a crime, they stole those cars from The Gangsters first! With all their ill-gotten gains, The Gangsters get C4 for their heist (which Chappie adamantly refuses to do because "it's a crimes[sic]") as well as a stack of PS4's (buy Sony products). Chappie also learns about death (which it clearly already has a concept of, because it refuses to use guns) and its own short 5-day lifespan in a really ham-fisted scene that could have been so much better. I imagine a better version of Chappie where it learns about death early in the film, only to learn about its own short lifespan later. Instead of being all in the course of a conversation about a dead dog. Anyway.

They return, and Chappie runs into Programmer Guy again. But Chappie is pissed with Programmer Guy because Programmer Guy put Chappie in a body with a limited lifespan. "I didn't know you'd become you!" Programmer Guy argues. Who knew that the robot he made sentient would become sentient?

Meanwhile, Religious Australian Douchebag turns off all the police bots by injecting them all with code at the same time, thus making moot the earlier point about how Programmer Guy couldn’t reprogram all the robots. All the crime that they'd stopped in South Africa comes back in like, 5 minutes. But this shutdown also effects Chappie, so Programmer Guy rescues it from The Gangsters and takes it back to the facility Chappie was made, so that he can fix it.

Programmer Guy fixes Chappie and gets it back up and running. They go to leave the facility and Chappie notices a test robot rig, just like its body.

"We can use this to save me! Transfer me into this body!" "No." Says Programmer Guy. "Why not?" Says Chappie (and myself). "Because your sentience is more than just your battery or hard drive! We don't know what it is!"

...

So Programmer Guy - who literally programmed Chappie's sentience - now seems to be claiming that it (Chappie) isn't just driven by code. It sounds like an argument for something more. That by programming Chappies sentience and letting it grow, Chappie has developed a soul.

There's so many issues with this statement. But it's okay. Because it's about to get worse.

So on the way out, Chappie notices one of the helmets that people use to pilot Religious Australian Douchebag's giant war mech. Programmer Guy briefly explains that it reads peoples brainwaves to pilot the gigantic mech.

"I can use this to transfer myself into another body!" Chappie says, stealing the helmet.

...

"Now hold up, Chappie." I say, rubbing my face. "Firstly, that's a helmet that reads human brainwaves. It can't read robot brainwaves because, well, you have not got a brain. And secondly, human brainwaves aren't sentience. They're just--"

Chappie has gone and downloaded all the information from the Internet about what Sentience is. Now Chappie is plugging a whole bunch of PS4's (buy Sony products) together and is plugging them into a Sony branded VAIO (buy Sony products) laptop and running some DOS looking software while wearing the helmet. The software keeps failing - it cannot find any sentience.

"Chappie. Chappie, stop. This scene isn't going to end well. It cannot read your mind and it's going to make the audience feel sad and sorry for you because--"

Oh. Look at that. The helmet made to scan human brains has managed to scan Chappie and display a visual representation of Chappies sentience...

... 

Remember earlier how I had said that Chappie picked up on some things but not others really quickly without much teaching involved? This is like, case and point right here. Chappie is taught nothing about what sentience is outside of a few throwaway lines by The Gangster’s trying to explain it in a pseudo-philosophical manner. And yet here, this 4-day old robot, goes and just downloads a bunch of information about sentience from the internet and immediately understands what it has to do to extract it. 

This very same robot that hasn’t figured out yet that sharp things hurt when you stab people with them.

Anyway... Moving on from this god-forsaken scene and--oh. Here comes one of The Gangsters (the nice one that Chappie calls 'mommy', because that's a thing). Chappie goes and slaps the helmet on her and it shows a visual representation of her sentience, too.

So apparently Chappie’s code-driven running-off-a-hard-drive sentience is just like human chemical-driven running-off-a-fleshy-meat-sack sentience. It’s another nudge the movie makes that, hey, this helmet is actually reading a soul and that’s the thing that humans have in common with Chappie. Or maybe it’s just dumb. The worst part is that this is actually important later.

So Chappie goes with The Gangsters on their heist, convinced that by doing it there’ll be enough money that it can buy itself a new body to transfer to. The whole act gets caught on video by a news helicopter, that reports that one of the police robots appears to have gone rogue and is helping criminals now. This catches the attention of Religious Australian Douchebag, who uses the information to convince his boss to let him go out in the war machine and destroy Chappie. She agrees.

Oh, and Chappie figures out here too that The Gangsters were lying to it about how it feels good to be stabbed after it stabs a police officer. Who knew?

Religious Australian Douchebag straps in to his war machine and goes after Chappie. So too does Golden Plated Gun Gangster, who wants his money and Chappie too, now. Programmer Guy also has grabbed a gun and grenades and rushed to Chappie to equip him for the coming three-way battle. 

Of course, Chappie refuses to take the gun because it doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But then the three-way battle between The Gangsters, Religious Australian Douchebag and Golden Plated Gun Gangster’s Gang kicks off. So we are treated to a slow-motion shot of Chappie clearly considering the gun and grenades in the back of Programmer Guy’s van as bullets ricochet and explosions ring out. Chappie starts taping a grenade to a knife. 

A character dies. The war robot is apparently not overkill enough since carpet bombing gangsters isn’t enough to kill them all. Then Chappie leaps out from inside of the nearby building (having apparently gone inside after taking the gun and grenades, so that it could make an entrance?). It throws the grenade knife and it sticks to the war robot (apparently it’s made out of polystyrene) and then starts shooting it up with some kind of heavy shotgun, which blows parts of the war robot off (definitely polystyrene).

Of course it’s not enough. Chappie gets shot up, and so does Programmer Guy. Programmer Guy is dying. Chappie loses the detonator for the knife grenade. Chappie rushes off to grab the brainwave helmet so that it can save Programmer Guy, but the helmet gets destroyed. One of The Gangster’s realises the error of his ways and tries to sacrifice himself so that everyone else can escape the flying war robot. It looks like everyone but the one Gangster is getting out. But before he can sacrifice himself, “mommy” Gangster rushes back and steals his thunder by getting shot up instead. Which leads to Chappie finding the detonator and blowing up the War Robot. 

It’s a mess of a scene, filled with “this almost happens, BUT THEN” over and over again. It’s deeply unsatisfying. 

Chappie and Programmer Guy rush off to the facility where Chappie was built. Chappie fucks Religious Australian Douchebag’s shit up. Like, no joke here. It looks like both his arms and both of his legs are broken, twisted at weird angles after being thrown through walls and into the ceiling. But he’s alive, and Chappie spits an “I forgive you.” At him. So much for not wanting to hurt anybody.

Programmer Guy’s body is tossed into the War Machine pilot chair. He’s only suffered a single stomach wound, so I don’t know why he’s not being taken to the hospital instead. Chappie puts the brainwave scanner helmet on Programmer Guy, and gets ready to transfer his mind into the test robot.

“Okay. This could actually kinda be redeemed. Chappie sacrificing its life. The creator becoming the very thing he created. That’s a pretty neat idea.” I think to myself.

Programmer Guy goes limp and gets transferred into the robot test rig. Disregarding questions and suspending my disbelief for a moment about how police robots have enough storage space to fit a human mind (we’ll even get to that later), it’s interesting. But the scene misses an opportunity for Programmer Guy really struggling with being in a robot that he created, or looking at his own corpse.

“Now get out, and spend the last few hours of Chappie’s life doing something meaningful. Redeem this horrible film.” I say. “Let’s upload Chappie’s mind wirelessly into one of the disabled Police Robots outside.” The film says. “Please no--”

So they slap the helmet on Chappie, and upload its mind into a nearby robot outside. 

Sigh.

So Programmer Robot Guy escapes, finds Chappie as it’s just picking itself up from the trash. They escape back to The Gangster lair, where “daddy” Gangster (also a thing) is currently mourning “mommy” Gangster. He’s going through a box of her things, burning old photos and such, when he finds a little USB drive.

“Does that say… no… no, please, god, no.” I think to myself.

Sure enough, it says something to the extent of ‘Mommy Brain Scan Backup’ on the side of the USB drive. Apparently, in the brief moments that Chappie had put the brainwave reading helmet on her in the earlier scene, it was enough to create a full backup of her mind.

And so our closing moments of the film cover how police robots have been taken off the streets, replaced once more by human officers. Chappie hacks into the robot manufacturer and uploads schematics for a new kind of robot, that it then wirelessly uploads “mommy” Gangster’s mind into. The final shot of the movie is of a robot with a woman’s face opening its eyes, and then we immediately cut to credits with a god-awful rap song to see out this god-awful movie.

Seriously. I have never felt the need to type out a rant about a film before now, it’s terrible. The movie struggles to figure out what exactly it wants to be, and what it’s concepts are. It never really succeeds at explaining to you how things work in this universe.

At one moment, we are made to believe that sentience is something truly unique and cannot be replicated or copied. The film seems to struggle with what concept of sentience it is rolling with. Sentience can be programmed. But Sentience is also the soul. Or maybe it’s brain scans. It’s never really answered what sentience is, but we’re apparently able to move it around easily - despite what we’re told half-way through the film.

Similarly, for a movie about sentient machines, it understands very little about how they work. I would have maybe bought the explanation, if the film explained how machines are unique in this world. But it never really does.

Here we have a Programmer that creates sentience – which can apparently be tested for. But then later on, we’re told to believe that the Programmer doesn’t quite know or understand what he’s created, and that here’s a degree of ‘magic’ involved in his code and in sentience itself. But then how did we confirm right at the start that he created sentience? 

And then we have the characters. There’s nobody likeable in this film. Nobody that you can connect with. Chappie is made to speak and act “gangster”, missing out on an opportunity to have a really cool, likeable robot. Programmer Guy is a coward. The Gangster’s are assholes and the one ‘nice’ Gangster (“mommy” Gangster) is made to be entirely paternal for no good reason. There’s hints that “mommy” and “daddy” Gangster may have had a child (or maybe I am reading too much into the art in scenes), and this feels like a missed opportunity to talk about Chappie’s importance to them if they did.

I also get slightly racist undertones from Blomkamp’s continued representations of South Africa. It’s always represented as a place on the brink of tearing itself apart, governed by useless and lazy bureaucracy, made up of slums and repurposed abandoned buildings. It always feels like a hopeless place, that is never changed for the better despite the actions of the characters. 

The movie fails to tell a good plot with what is an interesting concept, and it boggles my mind how blatantly obvious (to me, at least) it feels some of the solutions in there are, that they didn’t make it to the film. There was an opportunity for a sad but hopeful ending, but it was sacrificed in favour of an empty but “happy” ending.

Chappie is just... really, really bad.

[oodlyenough]

kali watches iron fist so you don’t have to: 1.01-1.03

i’m watching iron fist for two main reasons, the first being that i’m going to watch the defenders and i have a compulsive need to Know Everything, and the second combined reason being that i wanna see colleen and claire. that’s ... pretty much it. for the record, though, as much as i may have gone into this anticipating that i would not like it based on the reviews, it’s not like i actively want to hate it -- i would very much like to not be bored by all of danny’s stuff in defenders, i would much prefer to be invested in all 4 of the leads and to feel like this dude is worthy of hanging around jessica, matt and luke, all of whom i adore. 

but here we are. so. if you wanted to know the basics but don’t want to watch, episodes 1-3:

my first overall impression of this show is that the reviews were more or less correct: the characters aren’t that compelling, the pacing is boring, the fight scenes (there’s been... like...... 3 so far) are nothing special.

the cast of characters:

danny is probably supposed to be perceived as sweetly naive, but is mainly infuriatingly oblivious. he frequently ignores the requests of women and laughs at them when they express that they feel threatened by them. “i’m not dangerous!” he insists quite often for a guy who, when angry, lashes out violently.

when he first meets colleen, he speaks mandarin to her unprompted. yeah.

marvel is no stranger to the “white guy you hate to love” trope, so it’s weird how much they missed the mark with danny. like, on the face of it, he shouldn’t be that much less likable than someone like tony stark, and yet. And Yet. there’s just not a lot going on here: humour or charm or warmth or ...anything, really.

colleen wing runs a dojo and at this point really just wants to live her life but fucking danny won’t leave her alone. i like colleen, but so far she hasn’t been given a lot to do besides be shown up by danny, who explains dojo custom to her, shows her how to fight better (yes, really) and flagrantly ignores her wishes at every turn. she is at this point just about danny’s only ally. free her.

colleen also participates in a fight club where she wins money... because she uses the trick danny taught her. where would we be without him?

brother and sister dynamic duo ward & joy meachum used to be danny’s childhood “friends”, and i use air quotes because in the early flashbacks we see, “friend” is probably the wrong word. more accurately they were danny’s babysitters slash bullies.

ward is a moustache-twirling bully maybe 5 years danny’s senior who obviously gave danny swirlies. canonically we are told he used to lock danny in the freezer. we see a flashback of him playing monopoly with danny, where he angrily tells danny that his dad says “rules are for PUSSIES” and knocks the tokens off the board and then tattles to the parents that danny is misbehaving five seconds later.

joy is supposed to be the nice one, i guess. joy is actually pretty horrible in these 3 episodes, like everyone else on the show, but ostensibly she is “the nice meachum”, whereby nice means “doesn’t lock children in freezers, probably”. i suspect her arc will be learning her family secrets and defecting to some kind of redemption arc, but she literally auctions off a human being’s liver for political gain, so, that redemption is gonna be a tough sell.

henry or harry or something meachum is the patriarch puppetmaster of this horrible clan, and he is “dead”. except he isn’t dead, he lives in a secret penthouse that he can’t leave for fear of reprisal from the Hand, and only his son and his manservant know he’s alive. joy believes he is dead. why all of this is true is part of the mystery of the show, i think, but i also zone out every time henry and ward have scenes because they are both boring people, so it’s hard to say for sure.

jeri hogarth from jessica jones fame is a long-lost family friend of danny, and the first person to easily believe he is danny rand because he tells her some anecdotes from the start of her career as a law intern at rand enterprises. (rand... corp? rand co? whatever.) she puts danny up in a BEAUTIFUL apartment she just happens to have lying around. danny takes his high-threadcount sheet and sleeps on the floor.  

the basic plot of these episodes is this:

danny rand arrives in new york looking like he is homeless, walks into the giant building that bears his family name, and announces to everyone that this is his building and he is danny rand. no one believes him, because danny rand is supposed to have died 15 years ago, and also he seemingly hasn’t showered in, like, a decade. 

he decides the way to convince people of his real identity is to beat up a bunch of security guards and force his way into the building. at this point you see that it is a plot necessity for danny to be white, because if he was not white and, as a seemingly homeless person, attacked a bunch of rich people, he would probably already have been killed by police like 15 minutes into the pilot

he also breaks into someone’s house. 

nobody believes danny is danny. that is essentially the plot of the first 2 episodes in their entirety.

danny also spends the first two episodes living on the streets, by which i mean meditating under a tree in the in-between scenes. the local other homeless people reach out to him, and he has these weird moments of “haha oh i’m not actually one of you!!” and the other homeless people sort of pityingly tell him where he can get shoes.

he doesn’t wear shoes for like two episodes. everyone asks him to put on shoes: the meachums, colleen, fellow homeless people 

one of his homeless pals has an iphone (stolen) and explains that it will have data briefly before the original owner cancels the contract. danny’s first act confronted with the internet is to vanity google “danny rand”

through this he learns that everyone believes he died in the plane crash that killed his parents, and that his parents’ company, “Rand”, is now run by family friends the meachum siblings.

claiming to not believe him, the meachum siblings conspire to drug danny and send him to some kind of psych ward which seems to just kidnap homeless people, diagnose and drug them. what follows is about an episode’s worth of danny being strapped to a bed and drugged while we do the “i AM danny rand” “no you’re not” argument repeatedly.

this includes joy mailing him some M&Ms and danny mailing her back only the brown ones, which joy considers incontrovertible proof this is Really Danny, since apparently as children they both refused to eat brown M&Ms even though literally every colour of M&M tastes exactly the same. ward convinces her this is just a crazy coincidence~~~

i am assuming based on their treatment of danny, as well as the weird meachum-family livestream in the hospital rooms, that this hospital place isn’t legitimate, but its real raison d’etre has yet to be explained and may never be.

danny finally manages to balance his chi (really), which allows him to activtae his glow-y fist superpower and break out of the psych ward. he shows up at colleen’s house and somehow convinces her to let him stay the night, promising he’ll leave the next day.

some goons come looking for him, colleen kicks their asses, and the next day danny refuses to leave, because he needs to “protect” her. colleen says she doesn’t need protection, fuck you very much, and they have a friendly spar match to prove that Actually danny is better at martial arts than she is.

he promises to pay her a year’s worth of rent if she’ll just let him stay for one week. “you don’t have any money” says colleen to a man who hasn’t worn shoes in two episodes. “of course i have money i’m danny rand!!!” says danny, who i guess thinks he can just walk into any bank and demand a billion dollars on the honour system. colleen relents, because she wants money.

danny shows up at joy’s house to try and make nice with her, and what follows is kind of baffling. it was also obvious from the start that joy meachum thinks danny might actually be danny rand, and she feels sort of bad about how she and her brother conspire to kidnap, drug and gaslight him, yet her apology is... to offer him $40m to fuck off, change his name and never lay claim to his family’s corporation.

like, to be clear, danny is pretty uninteresting and not especially sympathetic on account of how he talks over all the women in his life and has no significant redeeming traits, but he’s still drugged and ends up held in a “psych ward” strapped to a bed and forcefed sedatives while everyone tells him he’s insane, and joy’s reaction to all of this is kind of a shrug, because she and her brother Worked Hard For The MoneyTM and don’t want to share it with some jackass who had the audacity to be in a plane crash as a child

danny steals a children’s craft he made for her when they were kids, lawyers up, and threatens to take them to court for his shares in the company. he then follows ward home, where he discovers that the meachum patriarch is actually still alive, right before being shoved out a window, Game of Thrones style.

RIP iron fist

it probably sounds like i’m kidding. that’s seriously what happens. if only the series just ended now.

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #89: A Girl and Her Dog.

Written: 4/5/2017                                                                            Music Week Song Listened to Before Writing: St Vincent - Marrow

When Norma was a young girl, her father had died of liver failure, and when it had happened she had been sitting by him, holding his hand, and had been the only one to see him pass, since her mother had to step out of the room for “just a second”, so that she could use the bathroom. The death was sort of hard on her, but while she mourned it felt like (something she would be able to articulate when she was older) she wasn’t grieving over the passing of her father, since she hardly even knew the man, and instead was grieving over the fact that she would never really know her father. Being alone with the dead man, while not fully understanding the process of death, didn’t help either. So, her mother, in order to look out for her baby girl, who she didn’t want to go crazy, brought home a puppy, a small German shepherd, so that the girl could have a companion. Sure, the mother had been a little worried when Norma had named the dog “Paul”, after her father, but she only figured that she was young, and that was just her way of healing from the pain, and, anyways, its not like she could have taken the dog back, causing the young girl to love her father (literally and symbolically) twice.

After the years passed, Norma and Paul were inseparable, they did everything together, and whenever they were apart they would both freak out. If Paul had been kicked outside for stealing food, or shitting in the house, not only would he wine and scratch at the door, but young Norma would do the same. It was as if they believed that if they were not within six feet of each other, they would die. When the mother brought home a bandanna for Paul, Norma refused to let the dog wear it until she could have one for herself, so they could match, and at one point she tried to convince her mother into buying her and the dog matching pajamas, but her mother strictly refused, claiming that dogs hate to wear clothes and its just not reasonable. Deep down she had suspicions that the dog would gladly put on pajamas, no matter how uncomfortable, only to match with the young girl, but these thoughts made the mother wonder if she was losing it. When Norma learned to read, she would make sure to read every word to Paul, so that he could join in on the story, but when she asked her mother to also teach the dog how to read, she had a surprisingly hard time explaining to the little girl why that was an impossible task.

One thing that just killed Norma’s mother inside, was she knew that the bond her daughter had with her replacement father would have been stronger than any connection she would have had with that drunk bastard, who had drank himself to death, Norma being to young at the time to remember how hateful he was in the end. Its not like things started out that way, at one point he was a really nice guy, but people change, the world keeps spinning, and happiness only lasts for a moment.

When school was coming around the corner, Norma’s mother worried about what she was going to do, because there was no way that her daughter was going to be allowed to bring the dog to school, and the young girl had a hard time understanding it, and, like plenty of children do, she believed her mother to be capable of anything, so when she was unable to find her way around a problem, Norma had thought her mother was choosing to separate the girl and the dog when she had to start school. Home school was considered, but the mother worried that her girl wouldn’t get much time to interact with other kids, and all of her important years of socialization would be spent with a dog, leading her daughter to have more in common with an animal than other children, and the life insurance money was on its last legs, meaning she would have to find a job soon. Yet, the girl was just so painfully happy with the dog that the mother had lay awake at nights, trying to figure out how to let everything work out, how to keep her daughter happy.

Now, I know you must be thinking something like, ‘Oh no, here we go again, another story about somebody bonding with a dog. I’m going to read all of this, get very emotionally attached to their relationship, the trouble they get into, all of that sappy crap, and then at the end the dogs going to die, and its going to be a fucking punch in the gut. I’ve dealt with enough dog stories to know what’s coming.’ If it makes you feel better, I can clear up all of your doubts right now, and tell you that, if I was somewhat correct, then you are absolutely wrong. This will not be one of those emotionally manipulative stories where the dog dies at the end in a depressing way, maybe with Norma having to put it down at the vet, holding its paw, symbolically losing her father a second time, everything the same, except this time she is now a teenager and is emotionally mature enough to be able to get past the death, and in a way it could give her closure for the loss of her father. Nor will there be some sort of strange, half assed twist at the end where Paul turns out to have been a girl dog all alone, and is able to give birth to a litter of puppies before she dies, which Norma is able to raise and who take care of Norma’s future children. And definitely don’t expect some sort of subversion, where it is actually Norma who dies, and Paul is the only one to be with her on her death bed, causing her to experience what her father had, and blah blah blah. Like I said, this is not one of those stories.

This is not a story about a dog.

Two weeks before Norma had to start kindergarten, she was on her front lawn one night, looking up a the stars with Paul, trying to find a way to sneak him into school. It was possible that if she dressed him up as a kid, she could pretend that he was her brother, but then she would have to hide his tail in the shorts, and she just couldn’t do that to him. Then, toying with the idea of pretending to be blind, with Paul posing as a service dog, she thought she may have found a good solution, but when she had turned to tell him, for once, he was not looking at her. Across the street was the object of his attention, which was a local tabby that Norma and Paul sometimes yelled at from inside the house, whenever they saw it outside, however, for the first time, without the mother knowing, Paul was in the front yard, without a leash (Norma had considered the dog to be more human, so she figured there would be no reason for him to run away, and the mother was unable to realize this because she was trying to figure out how to make home school work), and his instincts had kicked in.

Now, Norma’s house had been in the somewhat middle of the street, while, at the end of the street, lived her father’s old drinking buddy, who was with Norma’s old man the night he had decided to experiment with how many shots he could possibly drink within an hour, which caused his liver to give out under the pressure. The drinking buddy, one Randy Thompson, had decided to quit drinking after Paul had passed away, feeling guilty over letting him drink so much, but on that night he had decided to relapse, and not because he enjoyed it, but because he was unable to resist the urge to, and his AA sponsor had accidentally dropped her phone in the toilet when she forgot that it was in her back pocket, so when he had to be called off of the ledge, she unable to be found. So, he drank, and after he started to feel somewhat like shit for being drunk again, after a long period of sobriety, he decided that he should leave the bar while he is still somewhat conscious, and just go home, so that he could try to sleep it off. Now, as he was driving, inebriated, thanking God that he had been able to get home safety, a now unleashed Paul had decided to finally get the fucking cat that not only antagonized him, but also his companion, so in an attempt to solve his and Norma’s problem (being a dog, he wasn’t unaware of the school situation), once and for all, he dashed after the cat, while Randy had no time to react, and Paul was not only chewed and mangled by the tired of the truck, but his collar was also caught on the truck’s hitch, which caused Paul to get dragged, leaving blood and viscera trailing behind the truck for several feet, until Randy was able to react to the situation and slam on the breaks.

After Norma inevitably screamed, her mother had rushed outside, in a maternal panic, since her daughter not only seemed to be in danger, but was also outside without the mother being aware of it. After running out the front door to check on her daughter, who was screaming “Daddy died again, daddy died again”, and pointing at the dark trail that ended at the truck, and a lump that could reasonably be Paul, but was too mangled to tell from so far away. The mother decided to make sure, so she ran after the parked truck, running along the bloody trail, while Randy had believed that he left the dog behind in the road, so, trying to make things right or at least to accept the blame (he felt terrible for being drunk again, so he know he deserved some sort of punishment), he decided to back up until he was near the body, but he was too fucked up to consider checking his rear view mirror. Within a minute, Norma had become an orphan.

When Randy had felt the second thud, he thought he may have backed up too far, so he parked, and got out of his truck to check, but not only had he seen the lump of fur, bone, and guts that must have been what was left of the dog (whose collar had given way after the collision with the mother), and the other lump that was unmistakably human. Not too far away, a child was crying and screaming, as if somebody had stabbed her eyes out. After saying “no no no no no”, quietly to himself, Randy had run up to check and see if the woman was okay, if he should call an ambulance. Not only was not breathing, not blinking, but she also had her head twisted around 180°, which was a clear sign that he had fucked up more than he had believed was possible for him to fuck up.

Feeling a strange sense of unreality, Randy walked back to his car, slowly, as that young girl cried and cried, knowing that he couldn’t handle prison, he couldn’t handle knowing what he had done. After returning to his car, and feeling under his front seat, he had found a locked box, which he struggled to unlock, and, after popping it open, had produced something that seemed important, even if Norma had trouble seeing what it was. For reasons she would understand after it happened, she lost focus, for a short while, on the unbearable incident that played out in front of her, and cleared the tears out of her eyes so that she could understand what was happening. Clear eyed, Norma was just in time to hear the cracking noise, to see the drivers window shatter, to see the blood and chunks spray into the night air, to see her neighbor crumple to the road, back resting against the open driver’s door, as if he were limply sitting down, blood draining out of his head.

Norma couldn’t remember anything specific about what happened when the police came, what they may have said or what they looked like, but she could remember that they were nice. She didn’t know how she wound up in her next home, or why she had no family that could take care of her, but she remembers the feeling of isolation, the feeling that nobody cared about her pain. Most of her childhood, after she started school, had seemed to just blur together, not because she had blocked it out, it was because she had spent the entire time in a state of adhedonia, and simply couldn’t care. She was empty inside. Teachers would feel bad for her, they would think it was such a terrible thing for a young child to go through, to have to experience, and having to be empty at such a young age must have been unbearable. They believed that being a child was supposed to be a time when you could be free and happy, a time where you could run around and find amazement in the simplest games, in the most basic ideas. However, when she was older Norma had realized that she didn’t mind the depressive state, not just because she didn’t care about her empty feelings, or about anything really, but also because when it had went away, she found it to be much more bearable than the pain that was underneath.

Around the age of fifteen, it was as if Norma had come back to life, but only after the nightmares came. First, it seemed like a freak thing, she never dreamed so one bad nightmare was just bad luck, and she was comfortable with going back to sleep afterwards, even if the feeling of fear (not just because of fear specifically, but also due to the strong surge of general feeling after spending a majority of her adolescence in a state that felt emotionless) had been a shock to the system, making her think, at first, that she was dying. Then the next nightmare came, and on and on it went, one after another, every time she slept became the same experience all over again, it was as if her worst memories were waiting for her to fall asleep, so that they could replay themselves over and over, until the feeling became to much, causing her to wake up, but they were very patient, they knew that she had to go to sleep sometime. And then, after a while, as she tried to stay awake, little things started to remind her of that awful mess, and it seemed like so many small things would set her off, would cause her to relive that experience.

For a while she tried to just play sick, but her foster parents wouldn’t have any of it, they believed that she was just trying to get rid of school all together, just so that she could stay at home all day, doing nothing, like she seemed to love to do. They believed that, like many kids her age, she was just lazy. Other kids in the house had it worse than she did (their words), and they all seemed fine, so there was no reason for her to feel as if it were too much.

When she did have to go to school, often trying to keep her mind off of the incident, she would have to take frequent bathroom breaks so that she could hide away in a stall and cry in the way where you shake all over, where you want to scream, where you can hardly control your body, where you feel your sadness building and building, past any form of actual sadness, and eventually turning into agony, a feeling so strong that it had become a physical pain that she could do nothing to relieve, so she had to sob and writhe, trying to remind herself that it would have to go away, even if it felt like it never would. When it finally would pass, and she would catch her breath, relax for a bit, then return to class, she was haunted by the knowledge that it would return, that the peace was only temporary, and that the suffering was forever.

Sometimes she would blame herself for being so weak, while the effects of these spells would still linger, and it made her want to die, it made her feel pathetic, like she was to weak to handle life, and her caretakers didn’t do a thing to help her. Sometimes she would blame her nightmares, wishing that she could never sleep so that she could finally just forget about the whole thing, and spend the rest of her life, at the very least, in that numb state of adhedonia, but she knew that she would have to sleep. When she asked one of her foster siblings what she did to deal with the memories of seeing her baby brother getting drowned by her step father, the girl looked Norma right in the eyes, and told the suffering girl to follow her around the back, where she produced some strange pipe that Norma had never seen before. “What the hell is that for?” Norma had asked.

“You got nightmares, right?” Asked the girl.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I got nightmares too. Every night I have to relive it, but this helps make sure that you wont sleep for a long while. And when you finally do, you wont have enough energy to even dream. You’ll feel like people must feel when they die.”

“What the hell is it?”

Without any sense of humor, “Its fucking meth, what else would it be?”

That day Norma had learned that she didn’t really like how agitated, how jittery she had felt when she was on meth, but it also made her feel better than when she did when she was sober. Being a nervous wreck was better than suffering, and for three days straight she had avoided falling asleep, but, on the fourth day, she had realized that dreams weren’t the only problem. As she was twitching and leaving a convenience store with the other girl that had introduced her to the drug, they walked through a parking lot where Norma had seen a truck hitch that caused her to drop her soda, and made her want to tear her hair out on the spot. It seemed like the memories were worse while she was high, because not only was it like she was attached to a battery (her words to describe the feeling), but the memories had done the same. After trying to calm her down, and before running away since she the situation had freaked her the hell out, Norma’s companion had told her to try pot, but then claimed that if her problems were as bad as they seemed to be, then heroin would be the easiest way to get out of her head. The companion thought that the best solution to avoid the pain was to simply stop being yourself, to scramble up your brain’s chemicals so that you were some entirely different person,  but Norma didn’t want that, because she had hardly gotten the chance to be a person, drugging herself out of any sort of pain just seemed like a cop out.

So, deciding that she didn’t want anything to do with drugs, and coming down from the devil’s crystal, she decided to jump out of the second story window of her foster home, but the other girls (who she shared a room with) had prevented her, by pulling her away, and then keeping a watch on her all night (making sure not to tell their caretakers, who were only interested in the paycheck they received for watching the girls, and would have punished everyone for Norma’s “inability to control herself”), just to make sure that she wouldn’t get a chance to end things. When she woke up the next morning, she figured that she was at least lucky enough to not have dreamed that night, even if, later in the day, she would have seen a blind woman with a service dog, forcing her to remember the last words she had said to Paul, and after the breakdown, she had an epiphany.

Norma realized that her problem was that she wasn’t blind, like she had promised to her dog all of those years ago, and that the only way out of her miserable life, and into something even slightly better, was to make sure that she would never be able to see anything to remind her again. So, that night, as she lied sleepless in bed, one of her roommates keeping a close eye on her, she decided that she would have to waste no time, and would have to blind herself in the morning, when the other girls would be busy, getting ready for the day. As the girls got ready to start another lousy day, one of the younger ones let out a scream, and everybody rushed to the location, hoping to that their foster-father had decided to kill himself (he threatened the foster-mother with this act at least once a week), but instead saw Norma, dropped to her knees, knife at the floor, blood in her hands, and some strange chunks that nobody could identify, until one girl (the one who introduced Norma to narcotics) had put her hands on the injured girl’s wrists, trying to stop the bleeding, since she thought this was another suicide attempt, but was confused to feel that they were not the source of the bleeding, and then reeled back in horror at the eyeless girl in front of her.

The house was on lock down for a long time, the foster parents were trying to sweep the situation under the rug, worrying that if the police were involved, then it could damage their chances of getting their next check, it could shut them down for business. They kept Norma down in the basement, bandages wrapped around her head, covering her eyes, going down every so often to check the bleeding, to berate the girl for causing so much trouble, taking the self mutilation as a personal attack against her foster parents. And, for a couple hours, Norma felt pain, but of just the physical variety. She felt as if her problems weer finally behind her, that after things would cool down at the house, she would finally be able to continue through life, would finally be able to be happy again, like she was all of those years ago, in what seemed like a past life.

This feeling was only temporary, because her hope was quickly extinguished when her lack of vision gave more room to her imagination, and she started to see the events from that awful minute all over again. The death of her companion, of her mother, and then of the man who had killed them both. One, two, three, one, two, three, as if it were on instant replay. With no way to open her eyes, no way to stop seeing it, she had tried to feel her way around the basement, but she couldn’t find her way around, there was no way for her to find her way out, and she kept searching, feeling, frantically and blindly trying to find a way out of the basement, hoping that if she could get out of there then the images would stop, but it was only an act of desperation. Eventually she would leave the basement, but she would never leave her front lawn.

[mcgrannkileigh1996]

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[braindamageforbeginners]

On the nature of evil

Cycle 5, Day 9 I’m in the grips of an infusion hangover; it’s not the worst I’ve ever had, and I predict be back up to full-speed in a few hours, with the help of a lot of coffee and aspirin. However, recent events - combined with my fatigue (fhe coffee has’t kicked in yet) inspired me to go dig this out of the “Drafts” bin and finish rather than start from scratch. This will be long - my apologies - and have more than few typos and problems in it (for starters, I stitched it out of three or four other ideas/observations/proto-essays, and I’m all chemo hung-over now).

I’ve thought an awful lot lately about the nature of good and evil - as you do, when you face an existential threat that originates in your own body (and, because it’s me, I’m not going to get there in a straight-line path). I’m a reductionist (that’s shocking, I know), and, as a child, I wanted to know what made us us (DNA, I know, but I was hoping for more details). I once asked my high school biology teacher whether it would be more accurate to describe us as multicellular critters, or as walking colonies of specialized cells. She said the latter. Later in life, I put the same question to my biochemistry professor; his learned opinion was that we’re just walking, talking biochemical reactions that existed to provide the carbon molecules within us the best, most-stable shot in a hostile universe (that might seem dehumanizing until you realize that all life, in all its myriad forms, and all human progress and endeavors - from laying cement to composing an adagio - stem from a few basic rules of chemistry and physics, which is almost miraculous if you think about it). Which means that my tumor is the result of one or two brain cells getting very specific mutations (six or seven I think: I have the exact list of mutations written in my personal notebook, but I’m not sure it’s that interesting), and then growing, spreading, and recruiting other rogue cells. That’s not particularly evil; it’s just the horrible result of a few cells being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s just some rogue, reprogrammed bits of me; but, unlike the harmless bacteria in my gut or the fungus on my feet, it will grow and spread without constraint... until it kills me (hopefully that won’t happen, but it’s important to keep that in mind throughout the essay)..

One accusation I’ve occasionally heard leveled at atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other non-religious folk like myself is that by not having some grand villain to creation, we refuse to acknowledge the existence of evil. As a pragmatist, has always been, “Well, you have to. The bar has to be set somewhere.” Even though human morality may not exist in the vacuum of space beyond Pluto, humans have to have it - or at least pretend to (we’ll get to that very shortly). The best, most-useful definition comes from an obscure short story written by M. Shayne Bell, “Evil exists; it is intelligence in the service of entropy.”

To further pad this essay, and make it all about me; I have not mentioned my psychiatrist much (this isn’t Shrink; they’re two different people). This is both to protect her privacy, and because, despite what you might think from these writings, I do have aspects of my life I don’t spill out to the general public. But, she is - like everyone else on my health team - not above using any and all tools available to her. Which means that she’ll prescribe any medication she feels is indicated (I am indebted to her for her reviewing my meds and recommending the exotic antidepressant I’m on)(and the rather more-common anti-anxiety meds I’m on). However, despite being up-to-date on all psych meds (as far as I know, she specializes in cancer patients, so that one’s important)(she’s the doctor who noted my previous antidepressant lowers seizure threshold, so it might not be ideal for me), she’s still what I would call old-fashioned. Which she’ll listen for a few minutes, then say something deeply wounding. Or, worse, means she’ll say something innocuous that you’ll wake up at three am to think about. She was the person who told me to look at my current situation (namely, I have stay within easy driving distance of my oncology teams in SoCal and NoCal for a year) as a form of probation, rather than a sentence. I know my father hated that metaphor when I discussed it with him, but it was what I needed to hear (and, more importantly, she knows me well enough to know I despise and mistrust people who sugar-coat things) to start changing my thinking. A few months ago, when she asked how I spent most of my day, I told I wrote, went to the gym... and spent most of my time dealing with the unfortunate, bureaucratic paperwork and bills (well, as many as I can deal with) that tend to stack up when you get sick. Her response was, “That’s depressing” and it felt good initially, to hear a real grown-up say that, because it reassured me that I wasn’t just going insane. However, as I thought about it, I got angry, because she’s right - it is depressing - it should not be a full-time job to be a sick person, but that is exactly what it takes. I have access to some of the best doctors and medicine, and there is a still dangerous amount of luck involved in this project. There’s been a lot of skill on my part at gaming the insurance companies, when I can (which is rare), and I’ve had a tremendous amount of financial support from my family, but there are sick people who die by the boatload from very, very treatable diseases (yes, hospitals do throw you out; it actually happened to me). And even though there are resources available, there are not enough, and anyone who claims that we don’t have the money is clearly not familiar with the bloated military industrial complex, which even most hard-core conservatives I know admit is bloated.

If the theme of Day 47 was “How much have we, as a species, lost because we all went out of our way to stomp someone,” the theme of today is, “how many people have we unwittingly killed - how much blood is on our hands - because we never said “No” to the few dozen psychopaths who maintain a system that is addicted to death and misery. And, let’s be honest, there is a massive difference between considering how much potential we destroyed when we chased the neighbor kids off our lawn, and nobody giving Jeffrey Dahmer a damned good thrashing when he set the cat on fire (for starters, we can actually quantify Jeff’s evil based on how many people we found in the freezer; the mountains those kids never climbed are completely imaginary).

Returning to mathematics and statistics (it comforts me); just as I am a medical rarity (I’ve done the math, the word “freak” might be cruel, but it’s not inaccurate), but the vast majority of you, readers, are healthy and able-bodied - in other words, if the law of averages works, if you spread it across a population - then, just as I’m becoming aware that almost all of us are filled with madness and wonder and magic; then a few of us contain black holes from which light can not escape. Bipedal nightmares, if you will.

The point of this piece is not to frighten you, although some of you might be frightened. It’s merely to recognize that psychopaths and people with psychopathic tendencies (we’ll get there shortly) exist, and, in order to triumph, you don’t have to do much. Just don’t let them walk over you. That’s it.

Now, this is one area where I definitely am largely uneducated (I like writing, because, as long as I flash that warning up front, I feel I’ve done my duty), and I’m not going to discuss psychopaths (well, not yet, we’ll get there very shortly) inasmuch as I am going to discuss anti-social personality problems. Despite the name, it doesn’t describe people like myself who’d much rather sit at home with my dog, a beer, and the latest sci-fi series from Netflix rather than go out or meet new people (which I would, thanks). It describes people whose actions describe a lack of empathy or caring about other people; which includes psychopaths.

Here’s the thing; according to Ron Jonson’s “The Psychopath Test,” people with anti-social traits make up 1-3% of the general population, however, 30-40% of politicians, CEOs, financiers, etc. - the people at the helm of society, if you will - have anti-social personality traits. I’m sure that number is entirely inaccurate, and the wealthiest, most-powerful class of Western society is quite normal and compassionate, and we serfs are entirely responsible for the harmful, dangerous policies that govern us. I’m sure there’s some sort of long-term wisdom in the medico-legal policies governing my access to medicine I’m not aware of, and me dying or going bankrupt in the process is a minor price to pay for everyone else to benefit (and it might be, using that Law of Averages idea).

Of course, that might be a little extreme; however, law and morality are miles apart, and you confuse the two at your peril (as any racial minority who’s received an unnecessary traffic citation can attest). In my own case, at age 17, after an MRI confirmed that I had a brain tumor; my insurance company literally pulled the plug as I was being wheeled into the OR - entirely legally, I might add, using a loophole in the law in my coverage (I think it’s the hall-mark of morality to let a teen die of a preventable disease)(yes, hospitals do throw people out into the street). Thankfully, my parents were calmer and faster on their feet than I, and they were able to get things back on track - two days later.

The point is, we live in a society seemingly created by, and for, people who are unhindered by any sense of morality. Of course, I’ll admit that I’m an exceedingly small minority, and a self-solving problem, as far as society at large is concerned (literally, all it takes is stopping funding to a few programs at the FDA and NIH and I’ll be finding out if Pascalor or Marcus Aurelius was right. It’s quite possible the rules have changed (I’m sure they have, because I’ve successfully taken advantage of those changes)(and paid a lot of money for that privilege), and the faceless companies that were so eager to see me dead at various points are now fully-invested in my survival (good news, if I’m reading the FDA testing info right, I’m one of 80 people in this drug trial, and my gruesome end would represent a failure rate of 1.25%. I doubt that’s enough for them to step in and dramatically intervene on my behalf, but I’ll settle for CVS being a little more competent and generous about the Temodar).

As someone who is occasionally (okay, so more than occasionally) thoughtless or insensitive, but also horrified at the depths of human cruelty, I also feel like pointing out that we have an unhealthy fascination with anti-social personalities and anti-social personality problems. We marry them. We vote for them. We work for them. When, quite frankly, all it would take would be us - or someone else along the line - refusing to let these idiots get away with it. If we made them pay their taxes and stand at the back of the line. Now, that wouldn’t rid of us John Wayne Gacy or Ted Kaczynski, but they aren’t the problem. Adolf Eichmann is. Those of you familiar with recent history will probably have recoiled from the screen - probably rightfully; to the rest of you; Eichmann was a Colonel in the SS, and one of Hitler’s lieutenants; if there is one single person responsible for the planning and execution of the “Final Solution,” it is this man. Yes, I just broke Godwin’s Law, because the problem with Nazi Germany wasn’t actually the Nazis. Don’t get me wrong; they had to go; my point is, the relatively few Nazi zealots in power would have been completely incapacitated if their clerks and underlings had simply refused orders. Or if someone had dragged them off and told them that wasn’t cool.

Of course, this is being played in real-time with US detention of immigrant children. Again, I’ll bring up Nazis, but in this terrifying context: they didn’t have first, or even the biggest genocide; they were just the first to keep records that allowed the prosecution to build a case. So when you hear a hospital administrator say, “We’ll get back to you about that,” or a border bureaucrat say “We don’t know where the girls and toddlers are,” it should raise the hackles on the back of your neck. Once you get lost in the paperwork - in medical administration or the actual administration - that’s the first, quiet sign that someone doesn’t want to be held accountable if something bad happens (to counteract that, I’ve had good luck demanding to speak to supervisors or get employee ID numbers)(we will ignore the irony - in a few cases - that I was way too tired or in pain to really back up any threats).

At each step in this thing from July 5, 2002 until now, I’ve been lucky enough to find great doctors, surgeons, nurses, etc. who cared about their patients. Sadly, we live in a society that views Gregory House as a realistic character (there’s a fun med student drinking game where you sip whenever he inadvertently kills a patient). And the common thread throughout is that no one thinks it’s just a job or a paycheck or a way to get rich (if you want that, get MBA and become a hospital administrator - they’re usually paid way more than doctors). I think Mad Scientist and Senior Warlock would show up at the hospital tomorrow if they won the Powerball today (I could see them quitting work after finding some definitive cause of brain tumors and/or winning a Nobel Prize). In other words, the trick to finding great medical groups - is the same trick as finding someone who loves their job and would keep working even if all their financial obligations were met. In other words, you find someone who loves their job or their patients, and they’ll focus on being a better doctor. Which means fewer mistakes and/or dead patients.

To tie this all together - or attempt to, this is a Frankenstein’s Monster of writing combined with a morning head - I met, a med student a number of years ago (two neurosurgeries), who said, about my near-disastrous first-surgery (that’s the one where I was thrown out of the hospital while being wheeled into the OR, thanks to an insurance screw-up) that the medical system - such as it is, was more or less fine, dismissing me with “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.“ Telling someone they deserve to die due to profit margins and bureaucracy is right up with “Have you gained weight” as far as ways to promptly alienate and piss off other people. He also boasted about how many women hit on him, even though he wore a wedding ring (to be fair, I’d give it a 50-50 chance his wife was actually his mother’s corpse in a wedding dress), and how you have to be careful when providing free service because “poor people will tell their friends” - that man was not very smart (although I have no doubt he’d pass an IQ test)(BTW, there are a lot of studies showing that IQ tests are only slightly better than the MBTI or mood rings when judging intelligence; and it’s telling that whenever one of my crazy, brilliant physicians wants to assess my intelligence, they don’t use an IQ test), but, as far as I know, there are no set systems in place to ensure he didn’t graduate and go into practice (I mean, it’s possible he passed through med school and never got into a residency; I really hope some interview board looked at each afterward and said, “This is the creepiest motherfucker I’ve ever met; do we need another cadaver?”) . And, if he is practicing, I promise you - I’d bet my new lease on life on that statement (you need to understand, though, you’re betting your life on that statement if you’re one of his patients) - that he has, probably unintentionally, killed people because of his complete lack of interest in anything apart from money, sex, and self-aggrandizement - he has absolutely no interest or incentive to improve himself, or save more people, or take anything, other than his bank account to the next level. It’s possible the fear and/or wrongful death suits got to him (again, that’s assuming  a lot). It’s a single case, but it’s demonstrative that our society has no real check against human evil or one person getting a dangerous amount of power. You can read into that whatever political statements you like, I’m just noting as a chronic patient a few observations about the importance of compassion (or curiosity) as a quick indicator of physician quality.

The other important lesson here regarding medical sociopathy - and I might’ve written about this previously, forgive me - is that talent attracts talent. I write a lot about the nurses and physicians, but in the chemo ward, I have never seen the orderlies not take out the trash and/or replace linens (and they recently went on strike - and I really hope they got all their demands met, because they’re making it possible to be in a hospital and not feel under a microbial threat). My point is, even the orderlies - a group no one ever thinks of, are top-level. And when that’s just the cleaning staff, everyone else is of a similar competence. I don’t know why they (the orderlies) work there - it might just be a paycheck - but they’re good, and the nurses and doctors aren’t going to outshone by the facilities. Meanwhile, think of that one great doctor in an otherwise lousy practice or hospital. Go ahead and do some research if necessary; I’ll wait. I’m guessing there aren’t a whole lot.out there.

To bring all of this back to the current medico-political situation, the White House has something of a staffing problem, to say the least. At this point, I believe we have a series of rubber stamps in office at this point (everyone familiar with my “Fall Risk” story will know how I feel about that issue), and not particularly competent ones. That’s disturbing in and of itself, but the greater problem is that it’s an endorsement of psychopathy as policy, and, as noted, psychopaths aren’t even particularly intelligent or efficient. But, more importantly, the way you’re betting - if you’re a majority member - is that you will be, personally as wealthy, healthy, and powerful as you are now, and that you will never need the help of someone else. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, then maybe just slap the bullies when you see them. I’m more-serious than you might think; they’re not all going to stand down and behave, but it’s a safer bet than that Immortan Joe will overlook you and behave charitably.