Elsewhere in Dreams

You may find this conversation interesting. The difference, as far as I can see it, between rap and poetry.

MeHere: Okay, then. Some rappers, I’d say a great many of them, are poets. I fail to see a difference between a rap and a poem other than the way it is presented. Now I’ve seen or heard bad raps but poems can be bad too. It’s subjective, really. To one person, either work of art may be just scribble on a page. To another, that same scribble is felt and has flow and substance.

Steve: She speaks the truth.

Skrappybiskit (me): Actually, there are concrete things about a poem that makes it a *good* poem, at least as the poem relates to form. However, there’s always that mysterious something that you can’t put in a textbook that makes one poem better than another, or a slightly badly written poem seem better than a stiff well written one.

In that sense, there is and there isn’t subjectivism in art. From a technical standpoint, some are good, some are bad. From a personal standpoint, some touch, some don’t. The best art (and not a lot of modern art, imho) combines both of those things.

Which leads me to believe that most rap isn’t art. It’s skillful (sometimes) and relevant (at its best) and can be technically well-performed and well-written in relation to its genre but in the end falls short of true technical merit. Like much of pop culture.

Steve: But I could rap the above poem to a good beat and then you have a good rap. Are you telling me that’s not poetry?

Me: Of course you could. But the presentation does change the art form, correct? If you film a painting, does that make the film art? Not necessarily. The poem, in its written form, is a poem. Spoken over a beat, it’s rap. That changes it, at least in my view.

Besides, the question of whether or not someone *could* rap this poem is academic: almost no hip hop performers rap actual poetry. They perform a mutated type of poetry that is well-suited to being spoken over a beat, something normal poetry rarely is.

Again, I’m not saying that good rap is easy. I know it takes skill (I’ve written and performed a bit myself). But skill isn’t the sole determiner of whether something is good or “high” art.

Okay, since Sarah addressed Dutchness, I’m going to have to as well. Too beautiful a peach to leave hanging.

I mean, our Dutchness (at least amongst the youth) has generally devolved to the point of it being butt of jokes more often than a source of pride. Though I do know a few guys who swear by their frilly lace curtains. But I don’t know about them. Really.

But there’s still these old hardcore people out there that just love the fact that they have this enormous heritage. Maybe they’re compensating or something. But I always ask, what heritage? There’s good things, sure. But there’s a whole lot of bad in the mix. Certainly not something to be horribly proud of.

I mean check out this Calvin guy. The hero of every Dutch Reformer. For goodness sakes, people, the man was French! It seems in the five hundred proceeding years of history, the Dutch people co-opted this Frenchman and his theology and made him theirs.

So what else have the Dutch people done that they deserve our eternal and undying ethnic gratitude? Have they fought bravely in wars? Sure, but not many of them. Have they explored the world? Some of it. Have they produced musicians without number? No. They do, however, have two painters. Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Who apparently tore his own ear off.

I’d have to search the internet, but for Holland’s comparitive contribution to the world, we’re doing pretty badly here, aren’t we? England’s just a bit bigger, and they conquered most of the known world, from America to India and back again. They left their influence everywhere they went, and India still owes them a huge debt of gratitude for the advancements they provided to that once-backwards country.

Dutch East Indies? Is that the one? Ah. Nice empire. Feel free to flame me now, but at least the Germans can claim to be everlastingly evil. I come from a background of almost-runs.

Here are some witty samples of what I hear around work. And what I say.

Me: I need to have more tolerance for idiots.
Stu: On behalf of idiots, we thank you.

Lisa: (while showing off an apendectomy scar) You should always try to find a girl with scars!
Me: All my girlfriends have scars. From knowing me.

Me: (tasting spaghetti from an anonymous co-worker) Hmmm. No onions.
Him: You know my wife never cooks with onions.
Me: You need to get her out of that “no onion” box.
Him: Hey, yo, don’t dis my ho!

Brian: I see you’re wearing your hat backwards! Steve’s started a trend!
Me: *edited for content*

Brian: By any chance, have you seen the ladder?
Me: It’s in my back pocket.
Brian: Really? *looks at my back pocket* (Okay I made that last bit up)

Me: (holding two popsicle sticks) *glares at Stu*
Stu: *burps loudly*
Me: Aaahhh! My +2 popsicle sticks are nothing compared with your +5 burpaga!
(Yes, that was for RPG fans…)

Stu: *filing a block of metal by hand*
Me: This is why we’re worl-famous… quality workmanship.
Stu: Yeah, me an my double-sided bastard. (The file was made by Bastard Tools)
Me: I can photoshop an endmill in there, and we could put in on our website.
Stu: Could you make me thin?
Me: I’m not that good.

Okay, so I got a new email account, and a Gmail account at that. I call it scatterfingers@gmail.com - and you can feel free to email me there if you wish for some reason that I don’t understand.

But I thought it might be expeditious if I gave a small review of the service here.

First thing off, Gmail claims to be a different sort (pun!) of email service, and for once, the claim isn’t just hype. What you’ll see, instead of an inbox and folders, is an inbox, archives, and labels. No sorting into folders. Just a convenient search, and the ability to label things if you so wish.

You can mark messages with a star to denote that they are indeed special emails, and that label has its own pseudofolder. Otherwise, all your mail eventually gets archived in a catch-all psuedofolder, which you can search a la Google.com to find a particular past email.

The best feature that I can see is that fact that emails are sorted into conversations instead of each being delivered as a defacto email to your inbox. If you think that not having folders makes things a bit cluttered, this feature is one of the reasons that it’s not. I have a conversation (which is formatted much like a chat session) reaching upwards of 10 emails.

Gmail is also very fast, except to load, which takes about as much time as a normal email service like Yahoo! or Hotmail (I spit upon thee, Hotmail!). But inside the account itself, nothing takes more than a split second to perform, from sending to archiving to expanding a conversation so you can see each message separately.

So, mostly positive, right? Well, not really. While the frontend is feature-rich and very user-friendly, it’s going to take a while for people to get used to the Gmail system of starring and archiving in lue of folders and a proper inbox. Searching is a great feature, something other email providers need, and now. But the greatest drawback is in its Contacts features (or lack thereof). There’s no nicknames or short names, and the information you can provide is limited at best. It also has no way to import or export addresses, which would be a great feature. Especially for those of us that are using Yahoo! mail right now; it would be a great thing if I could import a CSV file of exported Yahoo! addresses. And I have a large contact list. You could even set up something that would import a XML file such as a MSN Messenger contact list export.

Other than that, Gmail gets a 8 out of 10. It’s clean, fast, and truly revolutionary. The ads are small and out of the way, something I can’t say for Yahoo! or Hotmail. And though the 1gb of space you get is its most trumpeted feature, I’d say it’s merely the icing on the cake.

Okay, so we all hate parking the car. But now, you don’t have to! With the help of a Linux box and a Volvo, a bunch of Swedish students created a car that parks itself.

Also available, this cool video, so you can see for yourself.

Wow. From TRu-dAT music comes this shirt that expresses most of what I think of TobyMac’s music.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away, there lived a beautiful young lady who didn’t know who she was. Although she knew her name quite well, as she had been called it all her life. She lived on the edge of a forest with her aunt, in a small wooden farmhouse, and though it sometimes seemed to her as though there should be more to her history, that was all she could remember. As far back in her past she could go, no other memory would appear, except for a constant thought in the back of her mind that somehow, sometime there was more to her world than just this little plot of land, the animals, and the deep enchanted forest.

Oh. I forgot to mention that the forest was indeed enchanted, like most forests are, didn’t I? You see, deep in the centre (as the tales go) there lived a wiley old wizard who could actually talk to the trees. In fact, if one listened closely at times it would sound as if the trees were talking back in a language old and forgotten by men. Or it could have just been the wind in the branches, but who wants to believe that?

“Never go into the forest, Mackenzie!” her aunt had cautioned her on many occasions (for that was the young lady’s name). “You know what happened to Hansel and Gretel!”

And yes, they had narrowly escaped death, the girl thought to herself, but that was because they were both quite clearly lacking any God-given common sense. Or sense of direction. “If I were in the forest,” she declared later, “I’d use a knife to mark the trees and make a path to follow.” She was an immensely sensible girl.

But this is all irrellevant, because she never did go into the forest because, as I’ve said, she was a sensible girl. Do sensible people enter enchanted forests? Not if they can help it! Enough cautionary tales have been told about enchanted forests to make certain that should a sensible person come across one, said person will pass by without even the slightest hint of curiosity. This is, co-incidentally, why there are so many more stupid people killed by sorcery that sensible people.

Now, she is not the only person that this tale involves. That would be boring. There is (as per tradition) a young prince. He too, was trapped in a place that he had always been, but he never had the thought that he was anything else but a prince. He hadn’t the imagination, for though he was in no way sensible, he was so boring a person that he didn’t need to be.

However, something happened to him one day that made him question everything that he had ever been taught, and all that he had ever learned. He read a book.

The castle he lived in – for a prince must have a castle – was a very large one, and had quite a few rooms that no one lived in anymore and were just ripe for a young man to explore. The only problem being the one young man that lived in the castle was too unimaginative to want to explore anything, and usually kept to himself in his room, watching the birds fly by. He never wondered how they flew. He knew they did, and that was enough for him.

However, one day quite against his will and also quite by accident, he was carrying some of his school books — history books! what a bore! — back to the old and hardly used library. His tutor (also a bore) had sent him there to get the next volume of the history of his country, which mostly involved faded pictures of old men with wierd hair using language no one could understand anymore, saying prodidgously important things about history-shaping matters, all of which was of the most pressing importance to his father who was also one of those old men with wierd hair who used the languages of antiquity. Strangely enough, the prince didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and why couldn’t they have just had a nice civilized game of chess instead of all the bloody wars? (And if he had the slightest spark within him, he would have groaned at his own pun.)

These thoughts were running through his mind as he placed his book back on the shelf – stirring up a good hundred years of dust – and grabbed the next one. As he did, the prince noticed that behind the next volume in his history textbook there was a strange cubbyhole. Inside was nothing except a book, bound in leather, looking as if it had been stored there by another of those ancient men with strange hair. But this prince, lacking in imagination a he was, knew from all the fairy tales that his former nurse (who was fired for talking such nonsense) had told him, that something this old, hidden behind a bookshelf, bound in leather, written by ancient men with strange hair, must be hugely important and perhaps even interesting. So, with the expression of a man hoeing potatoes, he pulled the book out and gazed at the cover.

It said: “Imagination.” Of course, you must understand that it’s strange to hear a book speak, especially for someone who’s always thought books were meant to be read, not listened to. As one my brothers might say, “Buy a Walkman, dude,” but that’s neither here nor there. Regardless of what the prince thought the duty of a book should be, it still spoke to him, and he just about dropped it.

And then came the dilemma - forget about the book, put it back, pretend it never existed, and certainly couldn’t pronounce words, or open the cover and find out what was inside?

Perhaps the book had already affected him, or perhaps he did indeed have a spark of curiosity inside of him that even fifteen years of training to be king hadn’t snuffed, but he decided to open the cover.

There were no pages inside. It was a hollow shell of a book, with nothing but a quantity of grey powder inside. “Grey powder?” he thought to himself. “Grey powder?” Twice, because there was quite a bit of it.

Suddenly from the deepest part of his being came a sneeze, such as had never been sneezed in that library before that instant. The prince closed the book, climbed down the ladder he had used to reach the shelf his books were on, and looked around. Suddenly he was possessed of a mad desire to understand — to know what things were, and how things worked, and why things existed -

Rushing out to the stables, he saddled his royal horse. Suddenly he looked up and noticed birds flitting along, singing songs, and he wondered, “How do birds fly?” And was startled by the thought that had never before entered his mind.

Now, just because he was suddenly afflicted with a great deal of curiosity did not mean he was suddenly particularly brilliant; if he had, the prince would have known that riding a horse is fit to teach one only of how much a bow it can put in the profile of ones legs. Knowledge, of course, would have been better found in the library.

However, it isn’t quite that easy for a prince to go on a journey of the imagination into a world he has not yet tasted, especially if he has the stereotypically evil guardian looking over his shoulder. Imagine for a second sitting on a horse while your evil mother looks over your shoulder. She is very tall. Imagine also that she has evil powers that she can weild according to her evil will. She is very tall, and very powerful. You would get off the horse too.

“What are you doing!” she shouted at him (because evil people never speak softly unless threatening or offering poisoned apples, cf. Snow While). It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, and it meant “Get back to your studies!” Because even though she didn’t share her husband’s passion for people of the past with strange haircuts, she realized there was no better way to keep the prince and his father busy, and also make work for tutor, which would in turn make her look beneficient, thereby raising public opinion of her Niceship, which in the end was a bang-up PR job. At least that’s what her ad agency said.

The prince gulped, descended from his royal steed, and ran back to his room to cower under his bed. What he didn’t realize in his terror was that he had dropped the book – which mysteriously remained sealed shut – directly in front of his evil mother.

Evil mothers are usually possessed of a keen sense of what most people (including myself) call curiosity, and this one (mostly because I didn’t have the imagination or desire to create her otherwise) was no different. She picked up the book, read the cover, and tried to open it, but ornery as books are, it refused to budge. Someday you will have this too if you decide to read; there are some books you just can’t get into.

Her evil brow furrowed into an evil scowl in a veritable earthquake of fury. “To the workshop!” she cried (again, loudly, because she was evil), as she ran from the stables to the secret set of musty steps that lead down to the bowels of her evil workshop. (Please note the word choice: “bowels” of her “workshop”. Not the “heart” of her “powder room”.)

She set the book down on a table next to a rather nasty-looking mixture of exotic ingredient boiling on a brass stand (even though there was no fire underneath, which is a sign to most people: “Do Not Drink!”), and went up to her crystal ball. It wasn’t actually crystal, because the crystal model cost a little bit more than she could safely embezzle from the palace grocery fund, but made from a sort of obsidian-black substance. She whipped off the handkerchief covering in a dramatinc sort of gesture, and placed her hand over it. “Crystal ball!” she commanded, loudly. “Tell me how to open this book.”

Nothing happened, because after all, she didn’t have a crystal ball.

She frowned again. “Obsidian-black substance ball!” she shouted, loudly. “How do I open this book?”

The obsidian-black ball awoke and looked at her. It was sort of picture of a flaming blue eye, seeing in all directions. A deep voice came from it: “You have found the book of power,” it entoned gravely. “With it you can conquer all of mankind.”

“But how do I open it?” she asked.

“It must be opened by a prince of the line of Thebes!”

She raised an eyebrow in a particularly evilish sort of way. “My son?”

“Your son.”

Smiling evilly, she ran up the steps to find him.

In the meanwhile, on the egde of the forest, the girl sat near the window of her little house, spinning cotton into thread, something that her aunt had asked her to do minutes before. She saw immense value in doing such household chores, because after all, she was a sensible girl.

Suddenly, she heard the sound of galloping hooves approaching, and looking out the window saw a little cloud of dust in the distance. She continued her spinning until she saw a young boy on a horse. Her aunt had taught her well in the art of entertainings strangers (which she almost never did, as the country was a quiet place with only the odd mistral coming through, and it was no use entertaining them, because they always insisted on entertaining you), so she – regretfully, because spinning cotton into thread is always a useful endeavor – stopped her spinning and went out to meet the young man.

“Hullo,” she said, stepping up behind him as he descended his horse.
“Oh!” he cried, suddenly falling to the ground and bruising a knee for his trouble. He looked up at her from his prostrate position. “Who are you?”

“That’s a rude question,” she told him, helping him up with one hand. “Hasn’t your mother taught you anything about entertaining people?”

“I can play the lyre,” he said dubiously, “and when I dance, people laugh, but I’m not very good at entertaining.”

She giggled. “No you silly boy!” she said. “I mean entertaining, not entertaining!” Because after all, the difference was so abundantly clear.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever done it, then,” he replied. “How does one entertain someone else, and by ‘entertain’ I mean ‘entertain’, not ‘entertain’?” He was dusting himself off.

“Well,” she said sensibly, “I must introduce myself to you.”

“Introduce?”

“I am Mackenzie,” she told him, offering her hand to him.

“Isn’t that what I asked you before?” he said, shaking her hand. “Seems a rather roundabout way to do things.”

“All polite things are roundabout,” Mackenzie replied primly. “How else would one waste time otherwise?”

“So you’re polite to waste time?”

“Quite so.”

“So you discuss trivialities at length to avoid having to talk of anything meaningful?” he said incredulously.

She looked at him strangely. “There you go trying to be impolite again!” she said. “You should have told me your name.”

He bowed. “I am prince Roderick the Seventy-Third of the line of Thebes, heir-apparent of all that you see, soon to be ruler of the world.”

She nodded, slowly and politely. “How is the weather around your place this time of year?”

The prince frowned, greatly puzzled. “I tell you that I will soon rule the known world, and you want to discuss the weather?”

“Certainly,” she said. “If it were otherwise, I would give the impression that I cared, which would be impolite.”

He shook his head in frustration. “I was like you, once,” he said. “Then I opened a book –” suddenly he realized that he no longer had the book “Imagination” in his posession…

* * *

His wicked mother in the meantime was searching the castle high and low, and in a strangely convenient manner forgot to look in the stable until most of the palace had been turned upside down. When she did, it drawing on night time. She flung open the double doors of the stable with a particularly evil gesture, and stood there in the flaming light of the torches and screamed: “Where is the prince!”

Because of palace cutbacks, there was no longer at twenty-four hour stableboy, so all she heard was the echo of her voice and the nervous noises made by the only remaining horse. “Cutbacks,” she muttered.

It was not long before she was riding into the evening toward the sunset, her obsidian-black ball tracing the route that the prince had taken.

* * *

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” asked Mackenzie nervously, glancing over her shoulder. “Won’t your mother get angry?”

“Yes she will,” the prince told her, “but I need that book!”

“What’s so important about a book?” she said. “I always found books a waste of time. So unsensible.”

“That’s exactly what makes them so fun.”

“What’s ‘fun’?”

“Don’t ask any more questions,” Roderick said. “All you need to know is that we are now descending into the bowels of the palace, and of my evil mother’s evil workshop.”

“Quite a sensible choice of words,” Mackenzie commented.

“Thank you,” replied the prince. “Now look around for a book that says ‘Imagination’.”

They searched around for a while before the prince came across a bit of dust seemingly randomly scattered over the table. He recognized the dust, however, and looked closer. “Here!” he said, motioning to Mackenzie. “Look what I found!” She hurried over and squinted at the dust lying on the table.

“It’s tiny little words,” she whispered. “What a silly thing to do?”

“Why are you whispering?” asked the prince. “And what does it say?”

“It says, ‘Imagination wuz here,’ and I’m whispering because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

The prince frowned. “That means she must have the book with her. We need to get it back!”

“Why?” asked Mackenzie, who seemed to be a never-ending fount of questions. “You’ve already got your imagination. What could you possibly do with the book?”

The prince frowned again. “I would spread it around the world,” he replied. He grinned. “Starting with you.”

* * *

The evil queen took the one-way path to Mackenzie’s house, cursing the king the entire time for making one-way paths to distant villiages. What was the point? Did anyone like one-way streets? Were they in style back then or something? (In her further comments on the subject, I will replace any offensive words she may have used with the word “drat” or “dratted” or “dratting”.) And that dratted boy! Always meddling – well, not always, but once was quite enough – in places where he didn’t belong! Just like his dratted father! Drat him! The man created one dratting way streets for crying out dratting loud! To quote Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, “Drat, drat, drat, drat!”

She broke off her thought of the king and his errant son (and groaned at her own pun) to follow the lead of her obsidian-black substance ball. “Where has he gone, all-seeing eye?” she asked, loudly. Which disturbed the sleep (since it was now night) of Mackenzie’s aunt, who hadn’t yet realized that Mackenzie (a sensible girl who could be trusted on her own) hadn’t tucked herself into bed. The aunt looked out the window, seeing what she thought was another loonie wandering around her front yard with an obsidian-black substance ball flaming blue fire, and went back to sleep.

It wasn’t long before the prince’s evil mother had traced all of his steps around the yard (using a method known in some countries as the “funky chicken”), and was galloping off down the one-way path back to her castle.

* * *

At the same time, the prince and Mackenzie had just left the palace, headed, for lack of a better idea, for Mackenzie’s house on the border of the enchanted forest. As they galloped on the prince’s royal steed, his mind flicked back to the race his royal steed had recently lost against his mother’s royal steed. Which he suddenly saw coming toward him in a cloud of dust.

* * *

Her son! There he was, just ten feet away going in the opposite direction! And once again, the queen cursed the dratted one-way street as the prince sped into the distance. As soon as she got to the nearest McDonahue’s rest station, she pulled a quick u-turn in the “emergency vehicles only” u-turn thingy, and began pounding down the path after him.

* * *

“She’s coming up behind us!” shouted Mackenzie, who was terrified of this evil woman on that very fast horse. “She did an illegal u-turn in the ‘emergency vehicles only’ u-turn thingy! She’s a monster!”

The prince nodded, urging his horse on just that little bit faster, the little bit that would be the difference between life and life as a toad.

Reaching the enchanted forest, they dismounted quickly and scurried into its depths. But not before Mackenzie cut a mark in the tree with her Swiss Chard Amy Knife.

“What are you doing?” the prince shouted. “We have to escape!”

“Not without leaving a trail,” said Mackenzie. “Haven’t you ever heard of Hansel and Gretal?”

“No!” the prince, again, shouted. “C’mon, we don’t have time to waste.”

They crashed through the forest, stopping ever so often to cut marks in trees, listening to the sounds of their impending doom coming closer and closer as they did.

The prince was practically begging. “This is a stupid idea,” he said. “Stupid. Who cares if we can find our way back if we’ve been turned into toads? We’ll like it here! This will be home!” But she kept stopping to cut marks in trees. “You’re hurting me,” he told her. “You’re hurting the trees! Greenpeace would be horrified.”

“They’re busy chaining themselves to the smithy,” she replied primly, even as the sound of breaking foliage and snapping sticks grew nearer.

They ran for a bit more, breaking into a clearing, where Mackenzie decided to make another mark in yet another tree.

“Don’t put a mark in that tree,” came a voice from behind them. They whirled to see an aged man sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. “I’m a certified member of Greenpeace, and I’m afraid I can’t allow you to do that.”

Mackenzie began, “Are you…”

“… the wizard that talks to trees?” the wizard who talks to trees finished. “Yeah, sorta. I mean, they do most of the talking, and I kinda just sit by and translate for the flowers and such.”

At that moment the prince’s evil stepmother broke through into the clearing and waved her wand at them menacingly. It was a fresh wand, too, and a very nice model recently featured on the Shopping Channel.

Nothing happened. “Sorry,” the old man said, rocking in his chair. “Your magic won’t work here.”

“Well, I can still kill him with my bare hands!” the queen shouted, scowling at her son. “Open this book for me, prince, or die knowing that you could have opened this book for me!” She realized as soon as she said it how stupid it sounded, but she scowled extra-convincingly to make up for it.

“Can’t you help us?” cried the prince to the wizard who translated the words of trees. “She’s going to kill me!”

“Nope,” the old man said, pulling a soother from his vest pocked. “I’m a pacifist.” He jammed it in his mouth, as if to make his point.

The queen’s frown morphed into a picture-perfect evil smile. The grandmother of all evil smiles. She took the book from her evil napsack pushed it toward him, and said, “Open it, fool!”

Looking down at the cover, the prince was taken aback. Where it had once said “Imagination”, it now said “Sheep”.

“Why did that book just say sheep?” the queen asked, stepping back. But not fast enough: the prince opened the book in a lightning, or at very least a 1969 Ford Mustang, movement, tossing the dust contained inside over her.

There was a small flash, and in the middle of the clearing stood a sheep. A black sheep. “Did you do that?” asked the prince of the wizard who listened to the words of trees.

The little man in the chair shrugged. “I needed a sweater.”

* * *

Book of imagination in hand, the prince and Mackenzie followed the trail she had made back to her Aunt’s house. They argued the entire way about whether or not his natural male sense of direction would have been enough had they had no markings. He almost instantly regretted sprinkling the imagination dust on her, as some of her comebacks were remarkably witty.

Eventually, they got married, so as to carry on the arguing more conveniently, but not before the prince had spread the dust of imagination throughout the land. Strangely, it never seemed to run out; no matter how much he gave out, there was always more to be had. Which, conveniently, is the moral of this story:

You can never get rid of dust.

Oh, and they all lived happily ever after. Until they died.

THE END.

PS: Okay, I lied. The moral of this story is that imagination isn’t a static quantity that you can somehow exaust. There’s always a bit more beyond the next bit of writers block. Or, for you people that enjoy carving, carving block. You may all groan at that pun. I should know this. I began this story, got half of it done in about an hour, and then finished the rest up six months later with fresh ideas, and much too much diet ginger ale.