Atomictumor

I saw a link on my googlie homepage that caught my eye. The link was to a Wired magazine article about how Sci-Fi is the last bastard bastion of big ideas literature.

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

I think the guy is spot on, especially when he starts poking at high-brow, realistic fiction.

From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball…. Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.

Anyhow, I’d never really heard of the Sci-Fi author referenced in the wired article. So I plugged his name, Cory Doctorow, into google to see what I could find. Lo and behold, he has his own website! Imagine that. Turns out Doctorow’s soap box is digital rights information type stuff. He even lets you down load his books for free which is great!

Digital rights is an old saw here at the Tumor, but why not have some food for thought.

Cory Doctorow:

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. [citation]

Doctorow, again:

 …as Woody Guthrie said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Here’s the quote from his book, After the Siege, that really got me thinking.

The USA was a pirate nation for the first 100 years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from with blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the US revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

Hmmm, Thoughts? The US of A, a pirate nation?? Was the Stars and Stripes once just a glorified jolly rodger? It’s hard to believe.

Andrew Bird, “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”

One day at his school
Juicebox told one of his friends
“This is my next mom”

Told AT bout it
We decided that it works
Next instead of Step

So, I’m the “next mom”
It has been an awesome ride
Can’t wait for the rest.

Last night was real neat
First time for me with all this
New things intrigue me.

Interrupted sleep
A little voice at the door
At 2:10 am.

It is rewarding
To give comfort when needed
Every parent’s job.

I’ve never had this
OMG! It’s so awesome.
Fulfilling and real.

Laying back in bed
All I did was treasure it.
I love my three boys.

Times are good, times are good.

Last night, after dropping off the kids at the legacy in-laws (thats the best name I can determine for a situation like this - alert Emily Post), me and my Lady went arm in arm to the local Mexican food eatery for a nice, grown up double date thing with Bos and Eaves.

With big ass mexican beer and margaritas.

And damn, lemme tell you. That place (the name of which always eludes me, and I can’t be arsed to look it up, so deal) throws some food at you. We’ve had the fajitas there before, and never finished the plate. So, since the Lady and I were both starving, we decided to split an order of fajitas along with a big ass sampler platter, and DAMN. We didn’t finish the food.

Finished the booze, tho, and then the four of us went back over here to drink more booze and play spades, on account of the Lady and I have a crazy psychic connection when we’re playing spades that almost allows us to crush the pathetic competition, except that we tend to be too ambitious, and end up losing. Still, one of these days, we might actually have those 12 tricks that we both think we do, and then we’ll be all like “IN YOUR FACE, COMPETITION” and the competition will be all like “damn, I just got pwned by AT and Ladyfriend”.

Then we’ll drink heavily and sit back, convinced in our mutual awesomnitude.

Look it up.

So, anyway, we got here, and the spades game never happened, because we got to drinking, and listening to music (Hot Chip and Radiohead, both on vinyl, for those keeping track), and we talked about stuff. While Bos and I were talking about cool, interesting, important things like the flash hard drive on his little Asus EEE (which I’m starting to see the point in. I mean, at first, I saw the 900 MHZ processor and half gig of RAM and thought “loser”, but it’s designed to surf the internet and do word processing, not, like, render all sorts of crazy 3D stuff, or track ballistic missiles or something. Those paying attention know that I have, in the house, at least 3 computers capable of rendering all sorts of crazy 3D stuff and track ballistic missiles, but what do I do with them? Surf the internet and word processing. So, there you go) and the new phone that I’m imminently getting to replace the old and busted Samsung piece of large ass heavy not working crap that I carry around on my belt, the ladies were talking about something boring like babies, or families, or something, and having some sort of moment, or something lame like that.

Who knows.

Anyway, we all had a good time, Eave’s nose didn’t seem bothered by the cat hair, and nobody got mauled by the dogs. Then they left, and the Lady and I cuddled up in our amazingly, incredibly, insanely comfortable new bed and snickered about how they had to go pick up their kids and put them to bed. Heh.

And then this morning, we slept in till 10:30 (!) and fixed tasty omelettes for breaky. And lo, it was good.

(this post really had a lot of parenthetical asides. Not sure whats up with all that. I guess I’ve missed em.)

I came into work today with my little external hard drive. See, for various reasons, I haven’t had music at work for the past few weeks like I always used to do, so I brought the hard drive in, hooked it up to the company lappy (yes, I have a company lappy. Season of change, lemme tell ya) and got down with some of the music.

Now, I didn’t have a lot of time to get a lot of music. You have to transfer it from the media computer, which (for various reasons) has a wifi connection, over to the lappy, which has a wifi connection, over to the hard drive. I guess I could have hooked the hard drive straight up to the media computer, but the plug is behind a dresser, and lo, the obstacles we all have.

So, I didn’t get a lot of music. I got maybe 14, 15 records, all newish stuff, or stuff that I haven’t listened to in a while. Stuff that kinda caught my eye in the 5 minutes I was throwing stuff on the drive (before the 45 minutes it took to transfer).

Today, after driving the kids to school, where Juicebox and I sang Happy Birthday to BJ, and talked about how he’ll have two mommie’s when we’re all in heaven, I got to work and plugged that bad boy in. Its been great listening to music.

The song playing now, and the one that prompted me to write this today, is Casimir Pulaski Day, by Sufjan Stevens. I haven’t listened to it in a long time, its a song that always had a huge emotional meaning to me.

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

It just always used to hit me.  I’d be in tears by the time the song was over, and when I got to the point when I felt done being in tears, when I wasn’t going to let sadness overwhelm me anymore, I just kinda avoided the song.  If it came on the shuffle, I’d skip it.

Well, it came on today, of all days.  And it brought back my talk with my little boy, who has two mommies.  And my big boy, in the car the other day, about how much he loves the people in his life.  And my talk with my second love of my life, about how she loves BJ for reasons that I can maybe understand but not explain, and about how I love my second love with every part.  And it made me think that I’m not sad that today’s birthday girl is gone, but that I’m happy that I have her birthday to celebrate with my family.  And it brought back 10 years in my past.  And it brought back the thought of untold years in my future.

And it still puts a lump in my throat, that song, but not the same way.  It brings out the amazing goodness of life, about how it has downs, sure, it has hard downs that we experience, but the amazing highs of being up overwhelm them, and how those surreal joys, when you’re thinking “this can’t be real” are somehow more real than the hard times.

And I smile instead, as I send a text message to that sweet second love of my life “I love you”/