“…As economists say, ‘the 100 dollar bills have all been picked off the pavement’. So I’m making it my life’s work to put a few back down. Hey, can I use the bathroom?”
Can I use the bathroom? Dana considered again the strange man in front of her. He wasn’t handcuffed, because that wasn’t her style. She felt they added an uncomfortable vibe to interrogations. There were no officers flanking him. Same reason.
Maybe these things and his obvious insanity had led him to misunderstand the situation, and think he was in less trouble than he actually was.
“Permission not granted, Mr Jensen.” She snapped. “We’ve now been talking for twenty minutes, and I still don’t understand why you did it. For what it’s worth, I think you’re fucking with me.”
“But it’s really simple,” he babbled excitedly. “Remember being a child, and seeing all the presents under the tree? Remember the mystery?”
Dana was Jewish, but she would not even give this man the dignity of a monkey wrench in the gears.
“And then you unwrapped them. A plastic wristwatch. A cheap Fisher-Price keyboard. Disappointing. You almost wished you could hit rewind and go back to when they were wrapped under the tree, didn’t you? That’s what I do. Most people solve mysteries. I create them. I leave wrapped presents around the world, for experts to find.”
Creating mysteries was a strange phrase for vandalising ancient works of art.
Yakub Jensen had been taken into custody earlier that morning, after he’d been caught defacing a priceless piece of pottery at Brooklyn Museum.
To the media, it was a storm in a teacup. Dana could attest that any storm seems big when you’re in the middle of it.
The Zuabu Bowl was an ancient piece of clay inscribed with imagery in auspice of an ancient Assyrian king. For historians, it was a seminal example of Levantine pottery. For modern day kings and princes, it was a source of national pride. The Brooklyn Museum had spent several million dollars in its acquisition.
Yakub Jensen had been examining the bowl behind its glass case, and had requested that the museum assistant leave him in private for a moment.
“I’m sorry, but your presence distracts.” His exact words.
The assistant – who was doubtless now spit-polishing his resume and ignoring all voicemail – had obeyed, shutting the door behind him. Yakub had been left alone with the Zuabu Bowl for a full five minutes, until a passing visitor had put his ear to the door and heard the chink-chink-chink of a hammer and chisel.
The vandalism had outraged and appalled the archaeological world, and had nearly sparked an international crisis.
For the past six hours since Jensen had been arrested, Dana had been hit with phone call after phone call.
Three museum curators. The head of the Archaeological Institute of America. The vice president of Syria. She’d even had the crown prince of Saudi Arabia – the fucking crown prince of Saudi Arabia – on the phone, jabbering away in remedial English. She’d instinctively held the phone receiver away from her head while talking to him, as if spittle was travelling through thousands of miles of cable to spray in her face.
They’d all said essentially the same thing. Death is too good for this man.
Yakub Jensen was now the meat in a delicate diplomatic sandwich, with various bodies and agencies trying to determine what to do with him. Dana had been summoned to get answers.
And now things were getting really strange.
“I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.” – Hunter S. Thompson
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” – Mel Brooks
“I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.” – Aleister Crowley
“If someone you never met calls you ‘arrogant’, it means he can’t find anything else. Otherwise, he would have called you “wrong’.” – Unknown, via Slate Star Codex
“Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. […] If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
“These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists.” – George Orwell
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” – Douglas Adams
“Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he adopts an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.” – Sir Peter Medawar
“Cats aren’t clean, they’re just covered with cat spit.”
– John S. Nichols
“[I]sn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?”
? Richard Dawkins
To describe something as ‘thought provoking’ usually means one can’t think of anything else to say about it. – Anthony Veitch
“I’m on a government watch list. But I’m not interested, because government watches only work twenty minutes out of every hour.” ? Jarod Kintz
“Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.””
“Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not…and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever” – Stephen King
I don’t like Christopher Hitchens. His voice is annoying and smug, I want his face to to beat up my fists, and when I learn that he agrees with me on something, I start to hope my opinion is wrong.
People call him “brave” and a “freethinker” for breaking ranks with his leftfag buddies and supporting George Bush’s Iraq war. I see a kid standing up for no other reason than because teach told everyone to sit down. Hard to seem rebellious and edgy when your opinions sound like carefully a/b tested PR copy with “NOT BAD. NEEDS MORE OUTRAGE – ED” scribbled in the corner.
But is my issue with Hitch? Or is it with something else? Maybe my problem is with his alcoholism.
blah blah blah
“There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully. This ought to be obvious by induction: on average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more.”
I wonder why he didn’t produce 997 words of copy that particular day by deleting “and sometimes more.” Seems redundant if you’ve already said “on average”. But yes, Hitch was noted for drinking like a fish (if fishes drank alcohol and this metaphor didn’t ride the intellectual short bus). Well, he’s not the first. Bukowski described beer as his “continuous blood.” Stephen King has an entire book that he doesn’t remember writing. Burroughs spent nearly his entire career afloat on a river of heroin: I wonder what work he would have produced on later drugs like crack cocaine and crystal meth. Alas, we will never know, because (as Nick Mamatas pointed out) his life was “tragically cut short by drugs at the age of eighty-three”.
Taking substances changes you. ‘Tis known. And if you rely on these chemicals to produce work, can you really say that it’s “your” work? Maybe beer and coke should get a co-writing credit on every early Stephen King novel. And I’ve heard it said that Burroughs himself is highly incidental in the creation of Junkie, Naked Lunch, et cetera. It was almost like heroin itself was writing through him, and he was just a planchette in some psychoactive Ouija board.
I’m not sure that I believe this. Geniuses needing stimulation and addicts needing excuses seem much the same to me. I’m reminded of that kid on reddit who photographed himself smoking a large number of joints of “medical marijuana” through those glass filters for blunts at a Snoop Dogg concert. Getting high at a concert was the last thing on his mind, I’m sure. It was medical marijuana – the one used in the online cannabis clinic in Ottawa.
But assuming this is true (that some writers can only work when drunk), then it causes a very stereotypical psychedelic thought: maybe being sloshed doesn’t impair us, it frees us. That the same impulse control that acts as a protective fence in social situations turns into a prison wall as soon as we try to let loose our imaginations.
My own personal experience in this area is inconclusive. Sometimes I get drunk and write pointlessly for an hour. One of these efforts ended up being my first published story.
I still have not looked at any of the others.
