Saalon Muyo

(Not the show. I like the show but this isn’t about the show. If you came to read about the show, here’s your Certificate of Disappointment.)

Not to beat a dead horse, but boy are we screwed up when it comes to our preference for violence over sex in our entertainment. Shoot a dude in the face and you can probably CGI-wipe enough of the blood to swing a PG-13 rating. Flash a boob and we’re already into R. Show some wang? Woah doggie, you tryin’ to make porn or what?

This always comes up when a show or a movie uses a lot of “gratuitous” nudity and sex and people want to show their intellectual bona fides. It’s sexist, it’s not sexist, it’s better than violence, it would be better than violence if it was justified–

–actually, let’s stop right there. Justified. I don’t want to rehash a lot of stuff about whether nudity should be justified or not. Same goes for violence.  This justified question makes me a little itchy. Like when that giant eyeball asked the Doctor if the human race was important and he asked, “Important? What does that mean, important? Six billion people, is that important?”

On second thought, maybe that quote doesn’t apply.  Cool quote, though, right?  Anyway, back to justification.

It’s kind of bunk, this justification thing, isn’t it? What justifies a naked boob, or a gunshot to the head, or Frank Langella’s balls shot in close up from behind and underneath? Is there ever a narrative reason for me to wach Frank Langella’s balls flapping all over the place? When he was about to sit on that piano bench, did we need to drop the camera to bench level for when he flapped that robe back so we could catch one more glimpse of the guy’s sack?

Maybe asking if nudity or violence is justified is the just asking the wrong question. But before we get there, let’s note – once again, for fun and giggles – what a double standard we have on the topics of sex and violence.  Culturally, we are totally, happily, gleefully fine with using violence purely for entertainment. Dude punches dude in face, girl engages in motorcycle kung-fu, Stephen Segal slowly breaks the bones of his attackers one at at time; we’re fine with all of it. I’m fine with all of it. I like watching people beat the crap out of each other. I saw a trailer for this Indonesian movie called The Raid where this guy wrestles another guy to the ground before sticking  gun to his head and shooting him multiple times and made giggly happy noises. I am going to see this movie specifically so that I can see as much well-staged gratuitous violence as possible.

Now. Let’s imagine a trailer filled with an equal amount of genitalia (Except for Frank Langella’s balls. Don’t think of Frank Langella’s balls!). Think the movie that trailer is selling is getting into as many theaters as the one with violent cranial trauma? (You’re totally thinking of Langella’s balls, aren’t you?)  You think if it was semen and not squib-blood splattering onto people’s faces,  you’d even be able to see that movie in that failing indie theater in the middle of nowhere?

But we know all of this, right? We realize we’re cuckoo for violence and terrified of sex. That’s not news. But I think it bears interestingly on this fallacy of justification.  Because you don’t justify sex or violence in a story any differently than you justify any actions a character takes.  Robert Parker spends a lot of time describing Spenser cooking, eating and drinking. How is that justified? Spenser likes to eat and drink. The guy can cook and enjoys it. We see it because it says something about Spenser and how he lives his life.  You should be “justifying” everything you do in a story, but really that means the story needs to justify itself.  If a character has a well drawn reason to want to screw someone, the sex is justified.

There are a lot of other things you can ask, if you’re interested in getting further into this. Does it move the story along? What would the story feel like without it? What was the scene supposed to make the audience think and feel?  All good questions, but they’re essentially the same things you’d be asking about a twenty page dinner scene or the end of 2001.  My point is that I don’t see how sex and nudity require special justification outside of the way you’d decide what else did or did not make a movie better.

Having said that…

What’s with the boob to penis ratio? I don’t argue this on my own behalf, but really, what’s the deal with guys freaking out every time they see a penis on screen? Have you imparted that much mystical strength into your own member that you think they have the power to turn you gay on the spot? Do they have Medusa like powers when you gaze too long at them?  Is that why the only times we see a penis on screen is when it’s attached to guys like Harvey Keitel and Gerard Depardieu, so that guys can freak out about the rest of what they’re seeing, too?

I mean this seriously, though. It bothers me that, once we’ve decided it’s OK to have some sexy time in a movie, we still have boundaries around whose nudity is ok to see.  You want to justify that topless girl? Show some man flesh, too.  Roger Ebert has written that erotica was one of the first uses of motion photography, and thus erotica is a valid genre of its own. I agree, but that needs to swing both ways. Almost all of the problems I have with nudity in film (and, let’s be honest, I don’t have that many) come back to the inequality of nudity.  If men felt as pressured to drop trou as women did to take off their bras, life in Hollywood would be a better place.  If we were more concerned with presenting people with a full and realistic portrait of sex than with the nonsense notion that sex requires special intellectual justification, we’d all be a little happier.

If justifying naughty time in film is that important to you, let’s start here.  Tell your partner that the next time you’re really ready to go, that they are not to oblige you until you justify why you want to have sex and what it will do to push you forward as a person. Have them demand an essay on the topic. If the justification is insufficiently complex, you’ll be forced to make do with Frank Langella’s balls and a sex toy of your choice.  Let me know how that works out for you.

I know I’m biased. When you meet your wife and two of your best friends in the same place, the nostalgia can get pretty thick. Even if that place only ever existed on a server in New York City.

Internet Relay Chat still exists. Like Usenet, it’s not and will never again be what it was, but you don’t have to look very hard to find an IRC chat room.  They’re used mostly for support these days – sometimes the thing they’re supporting is downloading cracked software – but I guess there are still people out there goofing off with people they’d never met like in the old days. I really don’t know. I can’t even bring myself to log on for research, anymore. My memories of those days are too strong.  I don’t want to talk to ghosts.

There was something really free and insane about being in IRC, something that was lost as the internet looked for more managed and controlled ways to get us to socialize.  In IRC, you could drop into a couple chat rooms while juggling a handful of private chats and it all made perfect sense.  Some people were exclusive to one room, but the rest were doing the same thing I did. You’d be talking about Babylon 5 in SciFact’s and rehashing MST3K jokes in the Armageddon Cab Company, and maybe you’d drop into a one-off chat room you just created to force someone to listen to a story idea you now regret telling anyone.  It was social anarchy, controlled only by the barest of administration tools and the threat of group disdain should you make things crappy for everyone else.

Things have changed.  You don’t meet people online like you used to.  Vestiges of the old internet remain, in practice or in spirit, but are scattered into niche communities so small and focused that you only run into them if you’ve got a reason to look.  The really anarchic societies on the net are the Reddits and the Metafilters, but there you’re trading in ideas. It’s not social, at least, not in the way I mean.  Anyway, message boards and Livejournal communities aren’t immediate. The best memories of IRC are of single, wonderful nights where conversations took on lives of their own and I stayed up into the early morning because I couldn’t bear to miss what would happen when I was gone. That’s not something that happens on a message board.

Facebook and its like have pushed us back into boxes where the people we meet are the people we met ten years before, while Instant Messaging programs like Google Chat and Skype keep us locked into one-to-one conversations with people we already like. It’s not that you never meet people, but you don’t meet them the same way. You don’t meet them in a hailstorm of silly, self-generated memes and shared sound clips from movies.  You don’t get that crackle of meeting someone over a drink for the first time and not knowing if you’ll ever talk again.  IRC was like that. It was bar hopping for anti-social teenage nerds, and now it’s gone.

When I talk about the old days to Brennen or Brent or Rachel – all people I met in those wild, old days – we end up circling around to Twitter.  Like IRC, there’s a bit of anarchy in its blood.  It’s not the same: It’s time delayed; you can’t split a conversation off into its own room; if you don’t individually follow every participant in a thread you’re missing the conversation. There are still some weird barriers to meeting people that IRC never had.  It’s close, though. It’s really, really close. I know it’s close because, for the first time since IRC, I’ve made friends – real, serious friendships – on Twitter.

When the economy came crashing down around our heads in 2008, I found my way to a podcast called Planet Money.  Within a few months, other listeners had found each other on Twitter. It started with a shared fear of where everything was headed, but it wasn’t long before it became a lot more for some of us.  Laura Conaway, who was in charge of wrangling the community around Planet Money, called us the Recession Club.  We’ve kept the name, but for those of us who still talk, we’re not a club anymore. We’re just friends.  We’ve met in fleshland; some of us multiple times. We wouldn’t have gotten there on a message board.  There’s something about being able to drop into a conversation and burn an hour with people that writing public emails can never do. Twitter gave us room for anarchy. Friendship needs a little bit of that to grow.

Last night was one of those nights. I don’t know what started it. You never do. At some point, running gags start overlapping and merging and people slip in as they realize there’s an anthill to be kicked. Your wife or roommate or parents or cats – whoever’s sharing meatspace with you – walks past and wonders what the hell you’re laughing at. You try to explain, but it’s impossible. It’s not just unfunny to anyone on the outside. It’s silly and stupid and weird.  You’re either part of the moment or you’re not.

That’s what the old days of IRC were about.  It was as close to most of us boring, suburban types will get to living in a big, bohemian house, drinking vodka out of coffee cups and sharing jokes that stop being funny when you walk out the door in the morning.  I’ll never get those old days back. The world that created them no longer exists. Nor has it gone away forever. Nights like last night, the feeling that when the parties are over you’ll have stumbled out with a new friend or two…I thought those days had passed. You can’t go home again, especially when you’re home is filled with Russian bots and Warez trading squatters, but I guess the road ahead isn’t always as unfamiliar as I feared.

A guy like me is supposed to say he’s used to rejection. Never popular at the best of times, abandoned by every friend and acquaintance just before high school, fumbling when it came to talking to women even after graduation; rejection is in my blood, right?  Well.

The thing about being the right mix of awkward and unpopular is that you learn quickly not to put yourself in the way of rejection if you can help it.  If someone starts giving signs of turning on you, you find a basement or a doorjamb and you wait it out like it’s a tornado. You might get hurt, but it’s what you expected. You never asked them to stop.  And women? Don’t you have to know how to talk to them before they can reject you?

It’s not as if I never got rejected. It happened plenty of times. It’s just not something unpopularity, shyness, and social awkwardness gave me special experience to handle. What I learned by being a loser is to hide. Invisibility is my super-power, not invulnerability.  Being a loser may have helped with my writing, but it taught me all the wrong lessons on how to turn that into a profession.

I got a rejection letter yesterday. It wasn’t the first and it’s assuredly far from the last. Rejection is what happens when you ask someone to pick your book out of a pile of other ones and tell you what they think of the first ten pages.  It happens in any profession.  We send resumes that don’t get response. We go on interviews that don’t work out. Getting hired is the end of an often long, humiliating process.  There’s a difference when someone rejects something you wrote, though.  Something that’s hard to describe.

Getting hired for a job is an exercise in perception.  Interviews, code samples, psyche tests and the rest are all just tricks people use to try and figure out if maybe you might be good at the job.  When they turn you down, they’re turning down their perception of your abilities. You can apply for a job you’re utterly qualified for, but get rejected because you didn’t make the sale.

At first, it feels the same way when someone says they don’t want your novel. It could be the query letter or the synopsis.  Maybe by the time they got to reading the novel, they’d already decided it wasn’t their bag.  They might have never gotten to the sample chapters.  It’s just a marketing problem or the wrong agent, you say, and you send the book out to the next one.  Continuing to think that after the tenth letter? That’s where it gets complicated, kids.

It takes a while, but the rejection letters start to whisper to you.  They make you wonder if it’s actually your marketing they’re rejecting.  Maybe your novel just isn’t any good.  Job hunts whisper nastiness in your ear as well, but HR is always one step removed.  The editor has a piece of you in his or her hands and is writing on it in red ink that it just isn’t good enough.

It starts to feel familiar. Like the last time you asked someone out and they got a look in their eyes that said you weren’t even on the same playing field as them. It’s rejection that cuts to a soft, exposed spot. You lifted up the armor and gave them the shot, hoping they wouldn’t take it. They did.

Here’s the thing though. All of that? It’s crap.

What I was supposed to learn when I was staying under the radar is that when someone takes that shot, it’s just one person. You think the people who can reliably troll a club and go home with someone, seemingly at will, didn’t get told no about a dozen times on the way to success?  They took the hits, adjusted a bit when something wasn’t working and kept going.

Yeah, ok, maybe you could tweak a few things.  Maybe your novel turns out not to be something no one wants a piece of.  It happens. It happens a lot.  Somewhere along the line, it might be time for some soul searching to figure out why so many people said no. It’s not like a lot of books don’t get rejected for good cause.  Maybe yours was one of those.  Maybe your novel does suck. That, though? That’s all beside the point.

The point – at least for someone like me who never learned to take the hits – is this: Getting punched in the gut is no excuse not to ask for another. If the book is great, if it sucks, if it’s just not what someone is going to pay you for; none of that matters.  You don’t stop being single by hiding from women, and you don’t get published by letting a rejection letter convince you to let something you spent a year on sit on your hard drive.

My last rejection letter was a year ago. I decided that I was doing a crap job marketing it and that I needed to rewrite my query.  That would have been fine, except that it took me a year of avoiding the thing entirely before I got back to it. I got antsy about being told no again, because I didn’t know how many more rejections I could take before I started to believe them.  The answer, I think, needs to be all of them. Soul searching and lesson learning is important, but it’s no good if it’s just another reason to stay under the radar. A haircut and a new outfit might help you get some attention, but it helps less than just asking the next person out.

Get back out on the dance floor.

I went into the woods and I came back unharmed. Then I scraped my elbow at the bar. My life in a nutshell/

I post a nauseating amount of crap about Doctor Who on my Twitter feed, don’t I? Don’t worry. If you’re not sick of it yet, I promise: I’ll get you over the hump.  There isn’t a thing in the world I can’t make people sick of if I put my mind to it.

Before you get there, though, maybe I should try to explain what went wrong in my brain, and why.

I never intended to watch Doctor Who. I’d seen a few episodes – my friend Brent brought over a handful of classic serials once – but though I didn’t have anything against it, it just didn’t seem like it was worth any real effort. It was neat, sure. Time traveler who changes faces and personalities when he dies?  What a cool way around actors leaving a popular part.  You never need a reboot of Doctor Who, and you never need to do the comic book thing and keep a character around and unchanged forever and ever.  The concept has charm.  But charm isn’t everything, and it came in a basket with cheap sets, inconsistant writing and often terrible guest acting.  Sure, the reboot had Christopher Eccleston (what, you haven’t been all over him since Shallow Grave?), but did a shinier, newer package really matter that much?

There was an entire season of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel that followed its airing of Doctor Who, and over the course of the year I saw the last two minutes of every episode of its second season.  Cybermen crashing through a window, Queen Victoria knighting, then banishing the Doctor…I saw it all.  What I got out of it was that Billie Piper looked a bit like a porn star and the show looked higher budgeted, but just as cheesy.

You can blame the change of heart on Netflix Instant Watch. There it was. The whole series, available to watch with a click.  The great thing about Instant Watch is that you don’t feel at all bad ignoring something that sucks, and it gives a bit of background distraction for when you really want an excuse to look away from the three sentences you’ve been rewriting for the past hour.  I could give the show a look, quit when I wanted, and earn the right to an opinion on it for the next time my friends started in about how I should give it a try.

I didn’t fall in love all at once. I got a childlike smile in the first episode, when the Doctor says he’ll defeat the living mannequins with “anti-plastic”, and I found myself really liking the energy and fun that pulsed through everything.  But love? Nah. It was a good show, but flawed, and not great.  Still, by the end of the first season I was enjoying myself more than I guessed. I didn’t need to keep watching, but I did want to.

It went like that for four seasons.  Eccleston left, and Tennant took the role of the Doctor.  I liked Eccleston, but Tennant was something new to me. I’d call it a man-crush, but that would be entirely too honest.  Companions came and went, the Daleks returned ad nauseam, and the show hummed along at a fun but unremarkable clip

With two exceptions.  This is where Eric falls in love with Steven Moffat.

I always tell people not to do what I did.  Don’t watch the whole series, not until you feel like you get the vibe of Doctor Who enough to get through the early flaws.  No, what you want to do is slam your face directly into Steven Moffat’s brian. Find season 3 and watch ”Blink”.  You don’t even need to know anything about the Doctor, except that he’s a time traveler. Even that they basically explain to you. “Blink” is one of those episodes of television that makes you giddy and scared and excited all at once. It’s 40-some minutes of pure, unfiltered excellence.  As soon as I watched it, I made Erin sit down and watch it with me.  But it was a blip, a great episode in a sea of mediocre-to-good ones.  Then, in the next season, Moffat returned with the baseball bat and slammed his best work yet into my head: “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”.  Again, an unexpected jolt of wonderful, unblemished writing.

This. This was the show I wanted to watch 13 episodes a season of.

Somewhere during all of this, I learned that the fourth season was Russell T. Davies’ final one as show runner, and that Steven Moffat was taking over.  Awesome!, I thought. But there was a concern: who was the guy taking over for David Tennant? Matt Smith?  Boy, he’s kind of odd looking, isn’t he? Like, super-duper British looking.  When season 5 rolled around, I wondered if I was going to love the writing only to hate the new Doctor.

I shouldn’t have been worried.  ”The Eleventh Hour”, the first episode of Moffat’s tenure on the show, works both as a soft reboot of the series and as a perfect transition for long-time watchers.  It’s everything that I loved about the more mixed early seasons, but with a class and confidence the previous series lacked.  Even my concerns about Matt Smith were gone.

The real sign that something had changed was Erin. She watched bits and pieces of the show before, but she didn’t miss a moment of the new era.  We tore through the fifth season, all the way to the brilliant, twisty, timey-wimey finale, “The Pandoria Opens”/”The Big Bang”.  We were sold. Hooked. Obsessed. We rewatched episodes.  A lot.  We texted each other quotes. It’s embarrassing, I know. But it’s true.

I didn’t start out as a Doctor Who fan. Even when I started to turn, I saw it as a guilty pleasure. Something to chat about with other fans, but not to be suggested to any but the most welcoming of friends. Moffat’s run changed that.  And the amazing thing about it is that it’s totally, completely faithful the series’ spirit and sense of fun.  The reason Moffat’s writing on the show is so damned good is because he crystalized everything that made the show what it was, and finally found a structure that grew up the narrative without sacrificing the childlike joy.

On the commentary for “The Eleventh Hour”, Moffat talks about the Doctor’s relationship with his companions – the people he takes with him on his adventures – and said something that totally captures what makes Doctor Who so wonderful at its best.  The Doctor and his companion isn’t the story of a man and a woman, or of friends adventuring together.  It’s about a child and a magic man from space.  It’s that feeling, the wonder of a child and a magic, time-traveling spaceman, that forms the heart of the show.  The humor, terror and joy all flow directly from that.

And now? Now I’m a slobbering fanboy. Doctor Who, at least the last two seasons, is the perfect mixture of hilarity and fear, of sadness and wonder.  There are episodes where you won’t stop laughing, and ones where you’ll catch yourself tearing up before you look unmanly in front of your wife.  There are even episodes where it all happens at once.  So, yeah, I’m a little over the moon for it.

Before I make you puke from the endless, overpowering wave of quotes and youtube clips, go find the third season on Netflix or wherever you grab stuff to watch, and sit down with “Blink”.  If that’s all you ever see of it, it’ll have been worth it.  Don’t believe me? Listen to Neil Gaiman. He gives the best introduction you could ask for to the show.

There’s a blue box, it’s bigger on the inside, it can go anywhere in space and time, sometimes even where it’s supposed to. There’s a bloke in the box, he’s called ‘The Doctor’ and when he gets where he’s going there’s going to be a problem and he’ll try to solve it and he’ll probably succeed because he’s awesome. Now shut up and go watch ‘Blink.’

Imagine a line. At one end – say, far off to your right – the line starts to blur and fade.  Out there is where all the awesome, elite programmers live.  Now take a good, long sprint back down the line, past the midpoint and off to your left.  Not all the way, just a bit. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m at my desk near that point on the line.  Away from the elite and the great and the specialized, near most of the rest of the people who are hacking out a living in this field.  What I’m saying is I’m not a great programmer.  I’m good, but I’m not great.

Except in one area: I’m as good a troubleshooter as anyone I know.  Oh, yeah, ok, there are ones better than me out there.  Lots, probably.  But when it comes to narrowing in on a problem, finding a hidden glitch, I’m pretty great when I put my mind to it. Before the rancid smell of ego overwhelms you, though, let me say one more thing: it’s not because I’m anything special.  It’s not knowledge or ability or intelligence. It’s just that most everyone else handcuffs themselves before they begin.

When something breaks, before you really start trying to understand why, your brain flashes up as good a model of what’s going on as it can manage. It makes a lot of assumptions to do this, things that you’re pretty sure are true, so that you have something to work with.  If an application is locking up every time you try to print, your brain dredges up any facts it can about how the application prints.  It never has enough facts, though, so assumptions form a sort of cartilage between the facts to hold the skeleton of the model together.  Then things go wrong.

Your model is screwed up, I promise you. You’ve missed something, or misunderstood something, or just plain gotten it all backwards.  That’s fine. You needed a starting place, and if you start staking out the really awful ones, you get a sense of the shape of the real problem.  Only people start to get confused over what was a fact and what was an assumption, and if one of those assumptions are wrong, and that assumption is connected to what’s kicking your application in the shin, you’ve effectively lost your way out of the maze.

At some point when you’re solving a really gnarly issue, you’ll hit a wall.  You’ve tried everything sane, you’ve exhausted the rational options and you’ve still gone nowhere.  That’s when you need to take a knife to your assumptions – even the ones that just have to be true, the ones that really should be facts – and start hacking.   Mere Smith blogged about screenwriting yesterday, and repeated one of the most useful lessons in fiction: Kill your darlings. Today, your assumptions are your your darlings, and they need to bleed.

This sounds obvious, right? You’re thinking I’m not really saying anything useful.  I get it. This is really obvious advice.  It’s just that almost no one takes it. Even, and especially, really smart people who know their crap.

I had a problem today when we were trying to deploy the most recent version of the website.  It was dying when trying to generate the spiriting for our images (something about which I understand almost nothing) and rolling back.  But why?  What was dying?

./smartsprites.sh: 8: java: not found

I read this yesterday, after an awful day involving low speed car wrecks and a hundred obnoxious technical problems, and I just thought, “Crap, something is wrong with this sprite garbage that I don’t understand.”  And, since it was the end of the day, I told myself I’d look at it with an awake brain tomorrow and went home.  I got in this morning, looked at the actual shell script that was failing and realized I’d been a moron.  There’s nothing wrong with the sprites.  It’s telling me what’s wrong right there.  It can’t find java.  It’s trying to call a command, and that command just plain doesn’t exist.

And here’s where the confusion sets in.  You think:

1. I’ve deployed this site 40 times before this.  We’ve never had a problem with java.
2. Nothing has been deleted or changed on the server.
3. Maybe the java command is failing and I’m just misunderstanding the error. Because…
4. I know for a fact that Java is installed.

Only you don’t.  In your bleary-eyed death march the day before, you switched from using Web Server 1 as your deploy target to Web Server 2, which used to just pick up the changes you deployed to 1.  Java is installed: on Web Server 1.  You don’t know crap about what’s installed on 2, because it never mattered until today.

When I brought my sysadmin over to say, “We don’t have java installed on Web Server 2,” he pushed back.

“Of course Java’s installed. It’s installed on every machine.”

This goes back and forth for about a minute.  This is what I mean when I say smart people let their assumptions become shackles.  We’ve got an error. The error says JAVA NOT FOUND and nothing else. You really, really feel like java was installed.  So something is incorrect. Either the error is wrong, or your assumption is off.  Most people, at this point, go with their assumption and test something else.  But it doesn’t cost you anything but a little time to prove it.  Make a run at the problem like you’re totally wrong about this one thing and see what happens.  Either you’re proven right (“Ha! Told you Java was installed!”) or you’re proven wrong and you just won a little bit of the future.

In this case, I had to log into the server and type “java” at the command prompt to prove it wasn’t installed.  If I hadn’t had such an easy way to test that, we’d have been arguing for a lot longer.  Assumptions do their best to keep you from doing things you feel are a waste of time.  It can’t be that, so testing it out would be a massive waste of time.  But when you’re lost in the swamp, you have to stop worrying about wasting time and you have to start hacking down weeds.  Any weeds you can see, even the ones you really suspect will just lead to a dead end.  You left efficiency behind when you got stuck with this problem.  Now you need to be mercenary and be will to turn your knife on anything that might be in your way.

Don’t be afraid to be scattershot. Don’t be afraid to try out things that can’t possibly be the issue.  Eliminate every option.  Remove all possibilities.  Improbable isn’t good enough. Prove it impossible, or mark it as a potential problem.  Don’t feel bad about stabbing your assumptions.  They’re usually asking for it.

I can’t say that it’s time to end the death penalty, because that time came and passed a while ago.  Any remaining moral justification for the death penalty slipped away when we started looking at DNA and proving that some of the people we’d killed weren’t actually guilty. I don’t know how someone learns – without any doubt –  that our justice system kills innocent people and just looks away without it twisting up their guts. Apparently they do it pretty easily.

At the least, we need to stop talking about the death penalty in terms of whether it’s justified if when someone does something bad enough. We should be past the point where our debate is if there are, in theory, people that deserve capital punishment. As Will Munny said, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

The question, if you want to keep seeing people executed, is simple: Now that you know that innocent people are going to die, how many innocents does the state need to kill before it becomes too much?

This isn’t a rhetorical question.  What’s the number? What percentage? Where’s the threshold where you say, “Now it’s too much,” and ask for it to end? Because this is the question, and it’s the only one.  I realize you think certain crimes deserve death. I disagree, but I’ll give that to you. You think people deserve to die for some crimes.  But how many innocent lives is punishment worth?

You should be able to look me in the eye and tell me that if 10 of the 46 people we killed last year were innocent, it still would’ve been worth it. Otherwise, the moral ground you’re pretending to stand on is just bullshit.

I guess I have relationships on the brain, since I’m cherry picking a quote from an AV Club article about Vonnegut.  But like almost everything he’s written, it’s hard to say it better than this:

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”

How did I get by before Brennen made me read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books?

A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind.  With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit.  Many marriages are between acquaintances.  You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.