Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Terrible Reviews: End of Watch

Pavowski10 Comments

I’ve just finished Stephen King’s End of Watch, the final installment of his Mr. Mercedes series. And I want to say I enjoyed it. Well — I did enjoy it, but I’m also really, really confused and kinda disappointed by it.

Spoilers below, but the novel is like two years old, so… you know …

The entire premise of the novel is a head-scratcher — Brady Hartsfield, the psycho killer from the first novel, has woken up from his coma with psychic abilities thanks to experimental drugs administered by a fame-chasing doctor. (That’s the One Big Lie — if you can swallow that, the book is fine!) Now, he’s reaching out through mind-control to induce suicide on a massive scale.

Which … okay. It’s a fascinating idea. And a horrific one. It’s a great idea for a Stephen King novel, in fact. Problem is — there hasn’t been a speck of the supernatural at work in either of the first two novels in the series. And all of a sudden, the big bad can do incredible things with his mind and a little game boy device and — everybody in the story just buys it. They just do!

It’s just a bizarre turn in a series that didn’t need a woo-woo bent. What was King thinking?

And the end is an absolute bummer. Hodges, the lovable grouch, succumbs — not to the attacks leveled by Brady, but to the cruel whim of cancer. And not moments after securing the dispatch of the big bad, but several months later. With no fanfare. He dies “off camera”, as it were, with King showing us an upbeat Hodges at his birthday party in the treatment center, upbeat and fighting, and then cutting to almost a year later at his funeral.

Again — wtf?

It may be true-to-life, and maybe that’s the point — but crikey. We read detective novels not to live in the real world of mundane (if horrible) cancer deaths, but to live vicariously by the seat of our pants. I’d have been happier if Hodges and Hartsfield managed to off each other in the end, or even if Hodges succumbed a few days or weeks later. But months? He finishes the baddie and looks ready to give cancer a run — but nope, surprise, he’s dead anyway?

Mr. Mercedes is a detective story — the finding of clues, the glimpses into the mind of a psycho, the inevitable pursuit and capture. King is great at those things, and all three novels tell a great detective story. But this final chapter is just laden with so much else.

Again, it’s not a problem with the content. I don’t mind the story of an aging protagonist struggling with cancer. I don’t mind the concept of a murderer using mind control to commit his crimes. In fact, that’s kind of awesome! But you can’t shoehorn those things into an established story world just for sharknados and giggles.

I whole-heartedly recommend Mr. Mercedes, the first book in the series. As for the later installations?

What was he thinking?

Verdict: Two and a half out of five daisies pushing through the fresh-tilled earth.

This terrible review is part of Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday.

Today’s Forecast: Iguanas

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I’ve just read over at CNN that the cold is so bad and so widespread and so untenable that Iguanas are literally freezing solid and dropping out of trees down in sunny Florida.

This sounds really sad and horrific until the punchline comes: they’re fine, but since they’re cold-blooded, their bodies have literally just shut down until the weather warms up again. At which point they’ll thaw out and fargo off back into their trees to munch on flies and look in two different directions at the same time.

Seriously. It gets too cold, so they just give up on life for a while. They don’t even do it deliberately, they just reach a point and shut down, like a Roomba running out of battery and parking itself in the middle of your foyer.

Once you learn that, it just becomes hilarious.

It would actually be a heck of a coping mechanism, wouldn’t it?

Stressed out at work? Significant other giving you a hard time? Too many bills coming in the mail? Ker-plunk. Down you go, and people just sort of step around you in your driveway until next season, when you come to.

iguana-2880916_1280
“What’s that? Reviews are next Tuesday? HRRRGGHHHH — My heart!

Meanwhile, y’know, over in Australia, apparently the highways are melting, and I dunno how the iguanas deal with that.

It’s a Bit Nippy

Pavowski5 Comments

Cold here.
So very, very cold.
Cold that strikes at your bones.
Cold that makes you forget warmth even exists.
Cold that defies metaphor and comparison and leaves only itself.
Cold cold cold cold cold.
I can’t lie — as a Georgia native, I prefer the extreme cold to the extreme heat. Atlanta thinks nothing of serving up weeks or even months at a time with highs in the 90s, where you can sweat from the simple act of opening your eyes in the morning. I should be desensitized to that by now, but I’m not, and by the looks of things, being 37 already, I’m not going to get any less sensitive to it from here on in.
So when I welcome winter every year, it’s genuine. I love Winter.
Of course, I love the typical Atlanta version of it, which is to say the temperature will dip below freezing maybe three or four times, and if you’re really really lucky, you’ll get a dusting of snow on one of those days, and bang-o, we’re out of school for a day or two while the Only Snow Plow in Atlanta makes its rounds. Needless to say, we’re not prepared for the arctic cone of destruction that’s engulfed the city for the past several days, and that threatens the next several more. They’re calling it a “winter bomb cyclone.” Seriously!

In our previous house, we had cold temps burst the pipes on at least two occasions and had scares on a couple more. Every time the mercury drops, I get antsy. Every faucet in our current house is left to drip overnight. Then the exterior lines froze, so I got out there in the 25-degree light of day (help!) with my wife’s hair dryer to coax a feeble stream of frigid water out of them and get them dripping again before scurrying back inside to huddle under a dozen comforters.
My dad sent over these weird-looking insulators — kinda looks like a jockstrap without the strap, or an oversized cyborg earmuff — to cover those faucets. “Don’t even need to drip ‘em with these things!”
But I trust no gadget to save me. In my nightmares, I hear the Chooom-HSSSSSSSSSSSSS of a ruptured water line spilling its guts into the walls. Even in the summertime. At this rate those things may keep dripping until march, faucet-jockstraps and all.

The cold also poses unique challenges for the runner. Summer is easy — wear the least amount of clothing that you can stand or that’s legal (whichever comes first) and go sweat until you dry out regardless. Winter? The trick is layers, but it can be overdone. Too little, and your tauntauns will freeze before you reach the first marker. Too much, and you sweat, and start shedding layers, and then your tauntauns freeze before you reach the second marker. Wind chill must be calculated. Amount of sunlight has to be considered. You could have degrees in maths (okay I’m not British but I love how they say “maths” when they mean “math”) and meteorology and still end up with frozen tauntauns on a quick 3-miler.
At least partially as a joke, I don’t doubt, my wife got me a full-fledged balaclava. A balaclava, for the uninitiated, has surprisingly little to do with puff pastry and a lot more to do with looking like a serious fargoing ninja. Except that the one she got me is bright red. Which makes me less “ninja” and more “what the hell is that lunatic running in sub-freezing temperatures wearing on his head — he’ll scare the deer”. I haven’t reached for it yet, but if the current “winter bomb cyclone” (I still can’t believe that’s really what they’re calling it!) persists, it won’t be long.

We’re back to work today, and not a day too soon, because if we had to keep those two — I’ll censor what I was about to call them — adorable little angels inside our house for one more day? (It’s too cold out there, play inside, I don’t know why it’s so cold just play, why are you hitting each other, put the cat down, kitchen tools are not toys, PLEASE STOP CRYING [that last is for my wife after many hours of the former].)
I might have donned my balaclava and my cyborg earmuffs and headed out for the third marker. And then later, been found like this:

the-shining

You know. Just …
Chillin.

It’s Come to This

Pavowski3 Comments

So the wife and I were just trying to decide if we were going to make it til midnight this New Year’s, and we saw — live on national television — a handful of twenty-somethings talking to one of the on-air personalities — earnestly and unashamedly — about how they suited up wearing diapers to the festivities in Times Square.

That’s your fifteen minutes. Diapers in Times Square.

I mean, wearing adult diapers with some of your closest friends seems like one of the most apropos ways to finish off 2017, so I guess there’s that.

Needless to say, we’re not staying up.

2017, we knew ye entirely too well.