South of Strange

The Torture of Rush Limbaugh

2009-04-22T23:52:00.002-07:00

From the motel’s security room, Robert guided us to our target: “Hot water,” he signaled. “Objects one.” This meant chief voice of the Republican Party was dodging drafts in the indoor hot tub. We all acknowledged and proceeded. Because capturing the demagogue was the most dangerous part of our plan, it was the most carefully rehearsed; we had covered seven different scenarios, training to the Colonel’s exacting standards.

The extraction went like clockwork. Sam, Don, and I carried out the kidnapping in less than two minutes. Rush Limbaugh objected to our masked, armed entry, but was immediately subdued with the help of a taser. We gagged, hooded, and handcuffed the fat bastard before levering him into a wheelbarrow with scrap two-by-fours.

Keying my mike, I whispered the word “secured.”

“Roger. Tango,” Robert replied, naming our exit route. We left the scene while Robert pointed the critical camera in another direction. Our threats of immediate execution kept Rush Limbaugh silent until he heard the van, specially modified for paraplegic drivers, come to a halt almost on top of him. With a supreme effort, we dumped the demagogue into the van and climbed in after him, abandoning the wheelbarrow.

The Colonel’s op-order was extremely detailed, right down to the unwritten insults: Rush Limbaugh is so fucking fat, we had to use a wheelbarrow.

Underway, the three of us in back took turns kicking Rush Limbaugh in his stomach with our combat-booted feet (Top using only his solid prosthetic foot). Rush Limbaugh made a terrified scream through the gag. He tried to curl into a fetal position, but the gelatinous mass of fat on his stomach forestalled him. Drawing my Tanto knife, I cut away at his swimming trunks and ripped them from his naked body, causing him to scream again. His genitals looked pathetically small under his putrescent flab. Sam and I each took one leg, straining against all his strength, for he knew exactly what we intended, and shrieked at the imminent damage to his manhood. With a coordinated yanking, Sam and I pulled his legs apart like a wishbone so that Top could steady himself against the ceiling and give Rush Limbaugh a powerful kick in the testicles.

Limbaugh’s scream retreated into his chest. He coughed, strained for air, and snapped into the fetal position again. We grabbed his legs and pressed his feet flat on the floor of the van so Top could step on the toes with his artificial foot, slowly increasing the pressure until Rush Limbaugh’s sobbing was a plea. Then we applied Chloroform to the whimpering sack of excrement before us and settled in for a good, long drive.

Driving far out of our way was an essential part of Operation Punchface. Our first destination was no more than a forty-five minute drive from the hotel, but we didn’t want Rush to sense this; we wanted him disoriented in time and location to encourage feelings of hopelessness.

First was a scheduled stop at a highway gas station. Sam had arranged for the automatic car wash to be left on after the store was closed. The Colonel supplied a roll of quarters; five minutes later, the water-based paint was gone, and whereas a sky-blue van had kidnapped Rush Limbaugh, we were now in a dark green van.

Less than one minute with a cordless drill, and the van had its original license-plate back on. The Colonel was one hell of a planner.

We turned back onto the highway and made for the interstate. Altogether, we spent six hours on the move. At one point, we revived Rush Limbaugh with kicks to the stomach so he could hear the section of highway passing under us. He soiled himself on the blue plastic tarp as we snapped on rubber gloves to insert a soporific suppository. He remained unconscious all the way to the prison, reviving only when we force-marched him into the building and deloused him.

Finally, we applied Chloroform and laid him on the mat in his new home, a small cinderblock cell. We’d set up a heater and humidifier to turn the basement into a sweltering, Central American summer. He woke up an hour later, gasping and wiping sweat from his gelatinous folds. We recorded him crawling across the dirty concrete floor. He retched into a disgusting, lidless toilet. After a few dry heaves, he wept into his fat hand for a moment, collected himself, and roared his desire to do us harm.

It was time to begin.

We opened the metal door with a slamming insistence. Sam and I had spent an entire afternoon on the installation, making sure it had precisely the right kind of booming clank when open or shut. The Colonel gave orders through a megaphone, mixing choice foreign phrases into his invective: “Ya’llah! Sieze the fatass! Vamos! Drag his worthless fat ass out here!”

All carefully rehearsed. All specially chosen. Operation Punchface had consumed us all, most especially the Colonel, in the month since we’d learned where the great gasbag would next be speaking.

Robert sicced the German shepherd on Rush Limbaugh, giving it just enough lead to chase the cowering talk radio king to the back corner of the cell. Sam and I stepped in as soon as Robert called the dog to heel.

Rush Limbaugh blubbered, his face contorted in fear as we approached. We were masked and bore cattle-prods at port-arms, like rifles. “Oh, no,” he moaned, turning. He scratched at the cinderblocks in his fear, trying to escape an eight-by-six foot cell.

We shocked him. He collapsed. We shocked the supine sophist again before dragging him out into the hall.

The Colonel cursed Rush Limbaugh for a whoreson in Arabic. “You will learn to respect authority, ya ibn sharmouta.” He switched to a bit of Dutch: “When we say goede tag, you will greet us with your backside and your hands on the wall!”

After applying hood and handcuffs, we forced Rush Limbaugh to walk through a plywood maze. It was very important to disorient him this way. The demagogue gasped for air, fighting to suck oxygen through the burlap. Finally, we reached the torture chamber and pulled the hood off so he could take in the tableau we had prepared.

Rush Limbaugh blinked at the light of a single naked bulb.

The Colonel sat in a lounge chair with torn fabric. A bucket sat by the end of a six-foot long wooden ramp reinforced with two-by-fours.

“Waterboarding?!” Rush Limbaugh erupted. Still maintaining a veneer of resistance, he made the word sound as if he had just gotten the joke, and was not amused.

“Live your rhetoric, fatass.” The Colonel was the only one of us who spoke to Rush Limbaugh. The rest of us had taped out mouths shut to avoid thoughtless violations of this rule. It was critical that the Colonel’s voice be the only one Limbaugh could hear during our enhanced interrogations.

Rush Limbaugh protested his poor health as we strapped him down.

“Do you fear for your constitution?” The Colonel asked him. “This is not the draft board, you sniveling turd. You kelb. We won’t excuse you from our service because of hemorrhoids.”

“Who are you people?” Rush Limbaugh demanded as we reinforced his bonds with duct tape – which we would later rip from his flesh.

“We are a tax-raising, sushi-munching, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood loving left wing freak show,” the Colonel said. He never raised his voice a decibel, delivering his lines in a cool, smooth tone – quite eerie, I have to admit; even I felt a shudder to hear him. “We are left-coast latté-sipping moonbats. We pal around with terrorist appeasers and plot to install socialism in America and force everyone into gay marriage.”

“Democrats,” Rush Limbaugh spat. He wiggled his head, trying to refuse the blindfold. “Did Nancy Pelosi put you up to this? I always knew that bitch woul…”

I punched him in the face. Catharsis became more than a word: the sound and effect were so satisfying that I punched him again, and then again, each blow more satisfying than the last, with greater precision and strength, so that for a moment I wanted to keep punching Rush Limbaugh in the face until he was destroyed.

“Enough,” the Colonel said, assuming a voice of authority. He cursed in Japanese.

A tense moment followed. It was not the first in our group’s history. I should explain that his rank was just an ironic title, a moniker earned in a poker game. Having humorously declared the establishment of his own militia group with the sole purpose of becoming its ranking officer, he demonstrated his authority: ‘You boys can call me “Colonel,”’ he said, handing an empty beer bottle to Top. ‘Top,’ he commanded, ‘get the Colonel another beer.’

‘Top’ is an affectionate nickname for First Sergeants. Prior to his loss of limb, Top had been exactly that. Now he took the empty. ‘Sure, Colonel. Would his colonel-ness like his diaper changed as well?’

For one dangerous instant, the entire room stopped breathing. Top had directly challenged the manhood of a soldier missing a key half-inch of spinal cord, condemned to a lifetime of sexless incontinence.

But the Colonel spun his wheelchair around to point at me, retorting: ‘No thanks, Top. That’s the Major’s job.’

The joke brought the house down – and formed our little band of broken brothers in one instant.
For myself, I had, in fact, been a major once, and the highest-ranking expert on Arab extremists in the US Air Force – until the bombing of Khobar Towers took my eye and most of the mobility in one arm. Robert was missing a lung from oil-smoke and God only knew what else. Sam was missing an arm from an IED. We were the Band of Broken Brothers, and Rush Limbaugh had offended us once too often.

‘This is our plan,’ the Colonel always reminded us. ‘We are in on this together.’ Yet to be honest, it was his plan. His leadership skills were not in dispute at all by this point. Yet for all his strength of character and intellect, the Colonel was the youngest and most damaged of us; and while he had turned these weaknesses into strengths, during the time we held Rush Limbaugh every one of us found ourselves sullen to the Colonel’s orders at some point.

This was strange for us, as we are all men of long military experience. Here in the torture chamber, this became more important than ever: the Colonel had to restrain us, to channel our anger and aggression to maximum effect.

“You are taking part in a great experiment,” the Colonel told the demagogue. “Your every reaction will be recorded for posterity, so be sure to give our techniques your utmost attention.”
I held a cloth ready over Rush Limbaugh’s face.

“What the hell do you people want from me?” Rush Limbaugh demanded.

“To find out how torture works,” the Colonel replied. He nodded to me, and I settled the terry-cloth over Rush Limbaugh’s face. “We will apply water for exactly twenty seconds. Quit squirming! This is no worse than a college hazing ritual, fatass. Don’t be such a little bitch.”

Don poured. Robert ran the camera. Sam held the timer. Everyone held their breath.

Rush Limbaugh withstood the procedure well…for about three seconds. Then he went into a fit, convulsing and nearly overturning the board by rocking from side to side in panic. Rush Limbaugh gagged, coughed, and shook until the twenty seconds were up. This short interval seemed an eternity to me, and I was only watching.

Our victim alternately sobbed and coughed for several minutes afterward while the Colonel spoke. “According to the Geneva Convention,” he explained, “you have just been tortured. By your own prescient analysis on the air, however, this was not torture at all. Do you wish to revise your statement at this time?”

Limbaugh spluttered “Yes.” After a wracking fit of coughing, he refused to say more.

“You are one determined fatass,” the Colonel observed. “Forced, for the first time in your miserable existence, to admit being wrong, you have done so. Too bad it took this much. But this is good. You will need your courage, because we have scheduled this treatment another one-hundred and eighty-two times over the next thirty days.”

Rush Limbaugh made the sound of an immense ego being ripped from a human soul.

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Be Seeing You, Number Six

2009-01-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

Patrick MacGoohan, known to his fans as "Number Six," passed away Tuesday. He was 80 years old. What terrific irony that he died one week to the day before the end of a presidency that brought his seminal TV creation The Prisoner to stark, awful realization.

MacGoohan's magnum opus appeared on BBC 42 years ago, yet seems fresh and frighteningly relevant. For those who never saw the show, it stars McGoohan as a British secret agent who resigns his job only to be kidnapped and renditioned to a remote facility. There, a series of overseers, each of whom wears the badge of Number Two, try every type of coercion and torture to learn his secrets. Other prisoners break, turning into pawns of the mysterious agency running The Village. There is nowhere to hide in The Village. Constant surveillance makes secrecy impossible, giving viewers the creepy and unforgettable Village greeting: "Be seeing you."

The only real escape is his own mind -- and his torturers pursue him even there.

The 17-episode series did not satisfy viewers expecting a James Bond-style breakout. Instead, they were treated to a show that became increasingly surreal and ended in jaw-dropping circularity. The series was not a light entertainment after all, but a sinister revelation about the origin of evil. Sooner or later, the series teaches us, we are all responsible.

If you haven't ever seen The Prisoner, now would be a good time to invest in the DVD boxed set. My own VHS episode collection is quite worn out by now, since this is the only television show I have never, ever gotten tired of watching.

For those of you who are unconvinced or who have a little time on your hands, here are some YouTube videos. The first is the introduction from Scott Apel on KTEH, the Public TV station in California that has played the series annually for almost two decades. Apel's commentary was the first I had ever heard of this show; he offers both illuminating insight and curious questions to the viewer. The last three are a TV interview with MacGoohan from the 1970s in which he talks about writing, producing, and directing the show.

Be seeing you!

Things We Believe

2008-08-07T21:46:00.001-07:00

"Tell me facts and I may remember them. Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever." -- Cherokee proverb

According to polls, a majority of Americans believe that humans were "created directly by God" instead of natural selection. Another poll found a majority of Americans believe in alien life, and a poll in 1997 determined that almost eight in ten Americans believe the US government is withholding physical evidence of said alien life. And one in ten Americans still believes Barack Obama is a Muslim.

If evolution is a fraud, then it is an elaborate fraud, requiring ten million fossils to be hidden in perfectly ordered layers across the globe. If the government is hiding the remains of alien crewmen from a crash at Roswell, New Mexico, it is the worst-kept secret in the world. And if Barack Obama is a Muslim, then why the hell did we spend all those months bombarded by headlines about his (insane, yet Christian) pastor?

The human ability to believe anything, even in the face of contrary evidence, is one of the most startling (and annoying) traits of our species. Everyone -- and by that I mean everyone -- insists they are a rational, reasonable creature, yet we are all quite irrational, and rare is the man swayed by reason alone. Not only do we Want to Believe, we actively create belief without even trying. It is hard-wired in our brains.

The reason is as simple as the stories we tell. The Bible is, indeed, the "Greatest Story Ever Told" -- at least in terms of sales -- because it opens with a compelling narrative. All that sturm und drang of the Old Testament is more than myth; it's damn good storytelling, and good stories never die.

By contrast, most biology textbooks that even discuss evolution will offer facts instead of a story. Few teachers have the ability (or the time) to tell the 'story' of life's complex history. But whenever science does receive a good narrative treatment, the results are always a spectacular success:

Mind you, there is no society on Earth without a belief system. Atheism does not come naturally to human beings. To evolve is to survive, and we are soft-skinned animals who survive with our brains.

Imagine Homo erectus leaving his cave for a late-night trip to his favorite boulder. He leans his spear against the boulder and pulls his, ah, 'equipment' from under that lionskin. As he urinates, he hears a rustling in the tall grass. "What's that?" He thinks.

Our caveman now faces Pascal's Wager. Just as Pascal posited that one should choose to believe in God because one loses little by believing, but may lose for eternity by not believing, our ancestor must decide what to believe about this rustling grass. He can believe some thing is causing that disturbance -- a lion stalking him, or a rival from another clan. Or, he can believe the noise is only the wind...or he may just choose to ignore the noise altogether.

Of course, if that rustling in the grass is a lion, and he decides the noise is innocent, he will probably die. The smart choice is to pick up his spear, make a grunting noise, and prepare for battle. If it is an innocent coincidence, he has lost nothing by reacting.

But all of this mental processing must happen very quickly; lions do not sit idle while Homo erectus stands around inventing decision-matrices. Logic and reason are pastimes for humans who have time for pastimes, while survival of the fittest usually means survival of the fastest. Thus we have evolved a brain that leaps to conclusions based on limited evidence.

We have evolved to make leaps of faith.

But evolution demands more than the survival of one individual. For a species to succeed, it must pass survival information to its young. Humans have a tremendous evolutionary advantage called language; long before the first written words, that meant storytelling.

Our caveman kills the lion and returns to his cave. Everyone asks him how he bagged the beast, and he tells them. Over the years to follow, other members of his clan recall the story and react to rustling grass with interest (and a ready spear). A century later, our primitive ancestor's great-great-grandkids are teaching their own children to watch out for lions.

But as human societies outgrew the need to hunt lions, their need for answers did not diminish. Indeed, the number of questions multiplied as our needs changed; so did our stories.

In a world far more complicated than our ancestor's hunt-or-be-hunted life on the savannah, a complex and often frightening world can surprise us. Worse, with 24-hour cable news channels, our mental world is too noisy to hear rustling grass. Our modern problem is too much information -- and an easy narrative will always beat out facts.

Let me say that again: a good story beats facts, every single freaking time.

This is why more than a third of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, a sizeable minority believes WMD were found in Iraq, and one in ten Americans still believes that Obama is a Muslim.

The operative word here is "belief." Once it becomes a question of faith, the game is almost always over. People are immune to facts because their minds resist information that does not fit an accepted narrative.

Even when we consciously know the narrative is a fraud, our brains continue to use the narrative. Furthermore, the brain changes the narrative to 'explain' facts that don't fit, or makes up new memories to maintain the narrative. There's simply no way to change everyone's mind, and no way to change a lot of minds quickly.

Which brings us to the Roswell 'incident.' In 1947, a mylar balloon crashed to the ground in New Mexico. Mylar was a new invention, capable of the astounding feat of retaking its shape after crushing. The farmer who discovered this 'wreckage' reported finding: "bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks." The balloon was part of Project Mogul, a secret project that equipped balloons for high-altitude aerial surveillance of Soviet military activities. (Remember, this was years before the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, and spy satellites.) In a misguided effort to cover up the news of a downed, secret-project balloon, some genius at the nearby Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release saying that a UFO had been recovered. The Army Air Force later retracted the statement, declaring the object a "weather balloon;" but the country was in the throes of UFO mania, so the retraction changed nothing.

Roswell's crashed flying saucer fit a narrative for UFO enthusiasts. By the time the US Air Force explained the sightings at Roswell, the story had taken on a life of its own. Popular culture, especially The X-Files, created an entertaining narrative of alien bodies and government cover-ups. Believers are convinced, and cannot be un-convinced.

As I said before, we Want To Believe -- indeed, we need to believe. Only through a torturous process are we ever able to stop believing anything, even the silliest of things. Facts and logic and reason are not enough. If you want to change minds, you have to tell a better story.

That Will Smith Movie (SPOILER WARNING)

2007-12-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This essay contains plot spoilers. You have been warned.

A plague has wiped out every human on the planet except Will Smith. But the disease doesn't just kill everyone – some of its victims turn into vampires. Every day, Smith hunts monsters, gathers food and supplies, and gives the audience flashback exposition. His wife and child are dead, victims of the pandemic. His own immunity has mysterious origins, but his blood may hold the key to humanity’s resurrection – because it turns out he isn’t really alone, after all! (Cue dramatic music…DUH duh duh DUUUHH)

If you think you’ve seen this movie before, you have. But I’ll get to that in a minute. First, let me ask you this: When a movie is based on a book, how faithful does it have to be?

Any debate over book-to-movie translation deserves better than hair-splitting, nitpicky details. No book transfers perfectly from page to screen. If Hollywood included every word of Moby Dick in a movie, it would be fifteen hours long. Moreover, faithful adaptations of some novels might be utterly incomprehensible to a general audience. There are some literary scenes that just don’t translate well to cinema. Recognizing these limitations, let’s look at the history of Will Smith’s ‘new’ movie.

In 1954, Richard Matheson published the post-apocalyptic novella I Am Legend. Protagonist Robert Neville faces long odds. His life has become a horrible routine of vampire-destruction, supply-gathering, and nightly assaults by an undead mob. Along the way, he offers scientific explanations for a vampire’s aversion to garlic and mirrors, vulnerability to stakes, and some pithy commentary on civilization.

If the novel is a bit dated in style and content, Matheson more than compensates: He was one of the first authors to take the vampires out of their gothic castles and put them in the suburban American landscape, making them less romantic and more terrifying.

A few years after publication, Matheson’s novel was adapted into a classic horror flick starring Vincent Price, retitled The Last Man on Earth.

Video is 1:47 long.

Matheson wrote the screenplay under a pseudonym, so The Last Man on Earth is the most faithful adaptation. It keeps the Los Angeles setting and almost the entire storyline. Neville learns that some plague victims have learned to suppress their bloodthirsty natures; in a horrific twist, Neville’s been killing fellow survivors, not just shambling, mindless undead. These half-vampires are ready to recreate civilization, but Neville has become their terrifying monster – their legend. They must destroy him before they can move on.

The movie’s surrealist feel and Vincent Price’s enduring portrayal of a lonely man’s descent into psychosis elevated The Last Man on Earth to cult status. Then in 1971, the novel was re-adapted into a Charlton Heston picture, retitled as Omega Man:

Video is 2:58 long.

Omega Man keeps the setting, but drops the vampires. Instead of a natural plague, biological warfare destroys the world. There is more interaction between Heston’s Neville and the mutant “Family.” The ending has changed. After Heston saves the half-mutant survivors with the antibodies in his blood, he dies crucifixion-style, mourned as a ‘savior’ to the new human race.

And now, Will Smith stars in the latest version of I Am Legend. Strangely, the only movie version to use the novella’s actual title could be the least faithful adaptation. In a transparent stab at post-9/11 relevance, the setting has been moved to Manhattan.

Video is 2:37 long.

Price and Heston both captured Neville’s brooding despair; Smith has genuine acting chops, but his wisecracking comic style might not be the best fit for Robert Neville. And there’s the finale. Smith has earned kudos among the art-house crowd before, but does he – or Hollywood, for that matter – have the integrity to keep the very un-Hollywood ending?

Video is 1:58 long.

Each version of this movie is a product of its own time. The Last Man on Earth was made in the days of the Red Scare, Omega Man came at a low point in the Cold War, and I Am Legend is colored by the War on Terror. In each case, the novel has been filmed through a different lens to deliver a different message – or, perhaps, to be understood by a different audience.

And really, what’s changed most since 1953 is the viewer. Each version reflects a different America – and meets the expectations of a different audience.

In the Los Angeles of The Last Man on Earth, there are no blacks or Hispanics; all the actors are white. Omega Man has a Star Trek-style mixed cast, but the hero is still marketing-department Caucasian. I Am Legend features a black man in the starring role. Gender roles change in each movie, too; the fainting housewife of Last Man on Earth is a laughable stereotype fit only for parody today.

I would argue this is exactly why Hollywood can – and should – re-imagine stories. For students of classical studies, it’s a familiar situation: The three tragedians of ancient Athens all wrote plays based on the same myths, often with the same titles, but with very different interpretations of the story.

So even if Hollywood has trouble with originality, remakes aren’t necessarily the work of unimaginative studio executives. A movie that doesn’t speak to us in our own time is not going to make money, much less make an impact on us.

And before we condemn Hollywood for recycling stories, let’s remember that I Am Legend isn’t a totally original novel. Matheson based his book on Mary Shelley's The Last Man, published in 1826. Her novel was partly inspired by Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. And think about it: What other popular book features a lone man fighting off hordes of cannibals?

Video is 1:38 long.

That’s right! I Am Legend belongs to the literary genre known as Robinsonade, ‘invented’ by Daniel Defoe, who was inspired by the mostly-fictional travelogues from the Age of Discovery, beginning with Marco Polo...who was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. There’s no story that hasn’t been told before.

Even Defoe’s famous story has been readapted many times into science fiction:

Video is 3:48 long.

Video is 0:28 long.

So let’s modify the original question. How faithful does a Hollywood script have to be when a book’s inspirational origins have already been recycled hundreds of times? Maybe we would be better off asking whether the movie preserves the author’s intentions, or Hollywood has mucked about with the plot too much? Did the actors and writers faithfully render the characters?

And last, but definitely not least: Does the movie make you want to read the book?

My War With Socrates

2007-05-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

I am at war with a Daemon.

His name is Socrates.

Socrates the Daemon first appeared to me as a child. "Hi," he said in a Tennessee Valley drawl. "Name's Socrates. I've been appointed as yer muse."

After a moment of stunned silence, I told him he looked like Pan, the ancient goat-god.

"Yeah," he said, "I git that a lot." He pointed at the typewriter in front of me. "Now, I believe you was workin' on sumthin?"

"I want to write a novel," I said. "But so far, it's not as good as I thought it would be."

He picked up the thin stack of pages. "Chapter One," he read. "The nuclear war was over. Were they the last people on Earth?" He stopped reading aloud, muttering instead. Then he dropped the stack back on my father's desk and said, "They're in a submarine? Tell the truth, son, you're just rippin' off On The Beach."

"That's only the setup," I explained. Actually, I was more inspired by the novels Alas, Babylon and Canticle For Leibowitz. My story was set in 2020, the submarine was like the "Seaview" on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and the crew was about to discover an island like the one in H.G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau.

I told him as much.

He stroked his goat beard, puffed his cigar, and nodded. "Okay. A collage of ripoffs. That could work, I guess. But what are you doin' right now?"

"Well," I said, "I'm kinda stuck on the next chapter, so I'm playing Mah Jongg..."

"NO," he said sharply. And he stabbed his cigar at me. "Git to work, boy."

That is Socrates for you: direct and uncompromising.

That happened when I was ten. Fast-forward now to college, when I wanted to write everything: plays, movies, novels, stories, poetry, articles, everything.

And I did write them.

I wrote a two-act science fiction play, a short fantasy movie, and half a novel about two college kids being chased through the Smoky Mountains by a killer.

"You'll never make a living as a writer," said my professor. "You can be a writer, and you can be published, but you won't make any real money at it."

"I don't want my daughter dating a writer," said my girlfriend's father.

"You ought to choose a real profession," said my advisor.

"Don't listen to them," Socrates warned. "I won't go away just 'cause you stop writing."

I joined the Army.

I had a family.

I stopped writing.

Socrates never let up the harassment. He would appear beside my bed at night, muttering: "You should be writing. What about that idea for a graphic novel? The one with the genetically-engineered animals who revolt against their enslavement by mankind? You should be writing that one. Or the story about the Confederate soldiers marching home after Appomattox who fall through a portal into a world just like their own, except it's a fantasy world with magic instead of bullets. Or what about..."

I won't say he haunted me.

I'd say he hunted me. I was like Frankenstein, running from his monster.

I got out of the Army and started college again.

"Get a useful degree," everyone said.

"Make your writing pay," my adviser said. "What about law school?"

Dad said I should do what I wanted to do.

Socrates said that was a good idea.

"So, what are you going to do after graduation?" My fiancée asked me.

So I got a degree with a career track I liked, or thought I liked... And discovered I didn't like it.

"Write," Socrates said every night. "What about that one story..."

But I had responsibilities. I couldn't spend all day and night banging out fiction -- no one pays you to be a fiction writer, even if you're the best. You get paid after the writing, and the rewriting, and the re-rewriting, are all done.

So I went into sales. It didn't last long.

To be a writer trying not to be a writer is awful. It makes you sullen and depressed. Socrates didn't help... He kept badgering me, making me miserable.

Not the sort of person that anyone would want to be around.

My ex-wife was long gone. My fiancée was now living with my former best friend. I was moved back into my parents' house, a thirty-something single parent.

"So write," Socrates said. "Whatcha got to lose that you ain't lost already?"

So like Ged in Wizard of Earthsea, or Frankenstein in Shelley's novel, I turned on the monster -- my Daemon -- and pursued him.

Which is how I found myself tied to this chair.

"Time to write that there novel," Socrates said, putting the Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera in the stereo.

A bubbling cauldron sat on the desk in front of me. Socrates dropped in a book, making the water bubble.

"Lynch on Lynch," he said. "And a Twin Peaks boxed set. Surrealism, set in the south." He hummed to himself, stirring the cauldron with a giant spoon.

My fingers touched the keyboard, hesitant.

"Only way to get out of this is to start writin', son," the Daemon said. He dropped a copy of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories. "Southern gothic fiction. There."

Visions filled my mind: a scene, a character, a situation.

"Write, son," he said, sounding almost sympathetic to my plight. Then he dropped in a whole collection of Pine Hill Haints music. "Alabama's ghost country," he said. "Always has been."

A blaze of ideas. My hands began to type, fast and furious, without a pause.

Last, but not least, Socrates dropped a map of Florence, Alabama into the mix. "Small towns're inherently scary, you know."

The cauldron boiled over, pouring into the keyboard and over my hands, but it was not hot... There was no burning, save the searing heat in my imagination.

"WRITE," he said in an unholy new voice.

And I did.

God help me, I did.

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