Author Archives: McPhedran

Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest

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The magic of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is in the point of view, Chief Bromden sharing his thoughts on the insanity of life.

The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she take a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon and night – throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everyone is driven like mad to keep with the passing of that fake time.

But generally it’s the other way, the slow way. She’ll turn the dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don’t move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three and she’s liable to hang them there till we rust. (71-2)

Life on the Commuter Train

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There is nothing like coming into the city on the train. It’s all here, inside and out, the buildings thick with cranes, the roads with trucks and plastic, the river wide and dark.

We have forgotten what we never had. We have looked back blind. We have let loose with a broken yarn. We are here, magnanimous and incompetent. Yes, yes, yes. Wait. That is the answer, that sound. It will come again. When we are gone.

The boy across from me eats salted cauliflower sticks, one by one, wiping his fingers on his drooping mask, intent on the next page of The Magician. He pokes his fingers inside again, licking off the last grains, crumples the bag, and holds the book up high, a better filter against the pandemic that anyone knew. The couple beside hold hands, the young man clinging, desperately asking her what she thinks through his tight mask. The girls at the front of the train explode hilariously, talking over one another in a spew, “I felt it touch my lips. That was it. I love weed. I was going to put it into the Pringles. I don’t remember a black bag. I will Venmo you right now. You look so good.”

I think of her, still think that we could make it work. I know it is not real, that she would wander away or lie or deny what she did and said, but still it is the idea of her, the magic of that streaming in, with her in a remarkable circumstance, sucking on her great left breast, marvelous in mass, supple and goose-pimpled, believing in everything, stuck in that, even when she laughs and her friend tells her to turn to the camera for the Tik Tok video.

And then it becomes something else, more wide, more clear, held, the way you might hold a piece of nothing like it was god or truth or love and really believe that. And so yeah, seven dollars for two shots and a mega-can of beer. Fuck me. That’s what it’s all about.

Writing Process: Convincing Readers to Love the Unlovable

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Dee Sinclair is impossible. She doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone. Don’t get me wrong. I love Dee. She is the Cat’s Pajamas on steroids. For me. That’s probably because she is so much like me: opinionated, cantankerous, demanding, isolated and always right. Readers of The Cx Trilogy and My Bad Side don’t find these attributes compelling. She’s does not inspire empathy or engagement. She is not likeable. That’s what they say.

And so, I’ve been at work, cleaning up Dee’s rough spots, gutting her bitter pontifications, making her a little more approachable. And while I might be making headway, I’m struggling with it. Dee doesn’t want people in her head. She wants to be left the fuck alone. In other words, what makes her so lovely to me is what makes her an impossible bitch for everyone else. No one likes to be told to fuck off. I get that. And that’s the thing about Dee. She’s good with that. She wants it like that. Leave her the fuck alone.

As soon as I explain why – the tragedy of her mother and sister – she just gets more pissed off. Pity? Fuck, no. Empathy? Why the fuck would she want that? She’s got the genes, the chromosomes, the essential strands of life. Why would she want any of us to understand or care? We can all go fuck ourselves. Done and done. And that’s my problem. Not her problem, but mine.

Marketing Department Working Overtime

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My head of marketing has this idea about how to spread word about my work:

Dude, you just kill me with ur love for pleasuring yourself. How many times per day u are able to pamper ur dongle? You are like an Olympic champion. You look like a mature person. What happens to u? A psycho-trauma?

I copied all your contacts from your email and I am about to share ur habit with your family. 1141USD, Bitcoin 1KZqsAvshQs7VcFkDLqeU7qRAe4raTx3bC, in 48 hours as soon as you read this notice you send my reward and I will sweep off the dirt I have got on you. If you defy me, within ninety six hours ur home movie is gonna be distributed on the net.

It might work, although $1,141 does seem a lot to pay.

The Back Stairs

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I am always dreaming of escaping down the back stairs of my childhood home. I can’t find my way out and get attacked by a massive dog sent down by my father. I punch and punch at it and yell for my father.

He sends me to school where I’m failing because I never listen. I run away from class, escaping out a twisting hallway and get stuck in a sewer that begins to flood.

Writing Process: No More Speechifying

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I have a tendency towards giving my characters speeches, or speechifying, as Tommy calls it. And it’s no good. It slows the narrative and, in the end, offers very little about the character. It’s really just me using them for my soapbox.

“To the mighty and fine Apollo.” Fitz raised his glass. “I look out at that river of ice out your backyard and think about those giants of millennials ago pushed off into the Davis Strait and into the great Atlantic, some of them the size of city blocks, whole towns, buildings and all, tankers, battleships, luxury liners, the works. They’re an impressive fleet, an impenetrable flotilla at the outset, only to gradually break apart, one from the other, going out into the bay, the strait, the ocean, down past Twillin’. But then they all come apart, not just one from the other, but the thing from itself. These mighty giants go out on their quest, out into the great unknown, just to dissolve, become bits and pieces, and then the water, gone like that. Seems to me that they might have a fate more suitable than that.” He opened another beer. “We’ll have another drink with you, and then we’ll be off.”

Covid-19 Travails

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Given the onslaught of Covid-19 variants and stupidity of too many in refusing to follow medical guidelines, it appears that abandoning my Pandemic Accomplishment posts in April was mighty premature.

Once I received my double vaccine along with so many others, I thought good times were on the way, even travelling abroad to Italy and Canada. But it was on these trips that any sense of normalcy was clearly not on the horizon. Crossing the border at Buffalo took took an additional three hours when we had to re-test at a cost of $450.

Canadian Customs form sending us back to USA

And then, when we returned to the States a week later, we were greeted by flashing lights and barriers and informed that the border was completely closed. A few nervous moments later, it was clarified that American residents were actually allowed to return.

The long and short of it is that nobody really knows what the rules are, which leads me to think that we’re going to be staying home again, writing and reading, puzzling and reflecting and of course maintaining with my Fishdom addiction. .

Level 3787, thank you very much

Bill Buford on Crowds

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While Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs specifically examines the nature of the football mobs, it offers us a much broader understanding of human nature: The history of the behavior of the crowds is a history of fear, of being a victim, of losing property, of a terror so powerful that it needs a name, to be accounted for, distorted into intelligibility, made safe. (184)

The violence, as I always read the next day, had been the work of outsiders, anarchists and agitators. But these thousands were not us. (189)

Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, NYC, 2010

This line, this boundary, I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I know no experience greater. (193)

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases, the moments of survival, of animal density, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought. There is only one, the present in its absoluteness. (205)