Donation to the The Water Project Item 19 - Donate to 30 26 charities/non-profits

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You know what's fucking awesome? Water. I drink a ton of that shit every single day. It comes out of holes in my house, and i can get it anytime I want. I love water so much, 57% of my body is made of it. I pour loads of perfectly potable water on my body daily, sometimes twice in one day. And as much as I love water I frequently and deliberately ingest other substances that will dehydrate me because the effects are pleasing.

Those things sound perfectly normal to anybody reading this (normal might not be the exact word, but you get my point), but if I said them to about a billion people that live on this planet I would sound like an insane super villain.

Or Superman, apparently. (Source)

That seems insane, with all the things that we can do there are still people that don't have one of the two things that are absolutely essential to life. The Water Project exists to try to make that disparity disappear. If you could help people to have access to a necessity without having to do anything wouldn't you?

Donation to the American Civil Liberties Union Item 19 - Donate to 30 27 charities/non-profits

So, do you care that the government can now assassinate essentially at will as long as they put the word "terrorist" on a report? Because the ACLU does. They care about all the important things that you should care about but can't because if you had to deal with all the atrocities of the world you'd be crippled by the sheer horror. They defend your privacy, your freedom and your life and most of the time we never hear about it. They are as close to a superhero as we're likely to get.

I made the decision to make this donation this week because of the drone issue (which is why I keep mentioning it). It bothers me a great deal that we've turned murder into a video game. I don't believe that these "targeted killings" (doesn't that sound so clean? Almost like an action film title) make anyone safer. Our government shouldn't be in the business of finding ways to kill it's citizens, that seems like a "no duh" statement, but apparently we need to keep telling them that.

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Review of "Slow Chocolate Autopsy" by Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean Item 16 - Finish 30 21 books

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I sought out this book (it doesn't appear to be in print in the US) for a few reasons. I became aware of it as a result of Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"books. I loved the concept of the prisoner of London, a man trapped spatially in London but not temporally. But the book wasn't content with one high concept and pushed for even greater oddity with it's free-form-nearly-to-the-point-of-stream-of-consciousness writing. The results are mixed for me.

The book is a collection of stories tied together by Norton, the aforementioned prisoner of London and nearly every review I could find of it refers to the book as a work of Psychogeography (which may be because they all cribbed from Wikipedia). It opens with a story about the death of Christopher Marlowe and ends with a bit about William S. Burroughs. It's appropriate, since much of the book is concerned with how the writer views himself and his art. Not just Sinclair, but writers in general. Norton is, I believe, at least at some level a stand-in for Sinclair and his frequent dips into self-loathing ring fairly true for anybody that has ever attempted to write anything for the sake of writing it.

The problem for me was the free-form style did become distracting. I know that this is more an indictment of my own tastes rather than of the any of the books merits, but this sort of style has always been rather hit or miss for me. But Sinclair is artful with his words and when he hits you feel it. One of my favorite bits from the text popped out at me and I knew I would have to use it end this appraisal: "The vagrant was a fine old man, one of the resources of the city, a living fossil; put some bone in the pouch of his cheeks, compost in his boots, he'd be a dead ringer for the Duke of Kent. One of them. Proof positive: there is no such thing as 'absolute poverty', except of the imagination."

Item 24 - Get Eye Surgery Part 1

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(I've finally posted part 2, go here to read it)

I've been wearing glasses since I was 5 years old and in the intervening years I have won the questionable distinction of having the worst eyesight of anyone in my family (this was true even when my grandparents were still alive). I've tried nearly every style of eyewear from contacts (which are painful in my prescription) to birth control glasses (which are painful in fifth grade). I had the unfortunate timing when I was 14 of getting a pair of round specs. The following year was the year that Harry Potter hit in a big way in the US, this, as you might imagine, resulted in no end of comments.

I made a decision when I was in my twenties that as soon as my eyes stopped changing enough that it was viable I would get laser eye surgery so that I would never have to wear a pair of glasses again. Three years ago my eyes finally hit that point, unfortunately my bank account was not so immune to those fluctuations and I convinced myself to put it off a bit longer. This project however finally gave me the reason that I needed to pull the trigger. I figured I should do it while I don't need reading glasses and my flex spending account and insurance are going to cover the bulk of the costs.

So this last week I went in for the pre-surgery exam. They did the usual tests that I am so used to, although I will never not blink at that puff of air, and then proceeded to a series of exciting new (to me) inspections. The first was carried out by the same woman that does that glaucoma test, which induces me to think that they chose her for her sadistic tendencies. The first thing we did was put in eye drops to numb my eyes.

"I'm not sure that we got that fully in my right eye," I said.

"Well, you'd better get some more in there, I'm not always perfect on this test and I will have to poke you in the eye," she explained.

"In the future, that is the sort of information you should probably keep to yourself or share after the test is complete," I suggested as I proceeded to dump half the remaining eyedrops in each eye.

After she had finished poking me in the eye (which I cannot stress enough is something I almost never let people do), we proceeded to a machine that took a picture of the back of my eye. This was my favorite part of the entire exam for sheer coolness factor. This is in spite of the fact that the test consisted entirely of what I imagine to be a repurposed green Xerox lamp being shined in my eyes.

Next came the pupil dilating eyedrops.

My eyes, as they are normally. Those pores!

Sans glasses. Ladies.

Wait, did you guys hear... I think...

...Yeah, I think they're starting to kick in.

Ohhhhh shiiiiiii---

I went full hobbit. You never go full hobbit

After the remaining examinations were finished. I was allowed to leave. Thankfully it was night, but I spent the next day squinting at everything to keep any stray light out. The rest of the evening wasn't all that great either. Anything I tried to read looked like this:

Which I'm not used to seeing without three or four drinks to back it up. My surgery is scheduled for next month, which is when I will post part 2 of this thrilling saga.

(Part 2 is now up)

Review of "20th Century Ghosts" by Joe Hill Item 16 - Finish 30 22 books

The first thing that I ever read by Joe Hill was his phenomenal comic series "Locke and Key" and from the first issue I was in the tank for him. This was my first experience with his prose and it was a good one. Hill has a way with short stories that very few modern writers can match and while there may be an impulse from some to qualify that with some nonsense about the horror genre (mostly from the same quarters that start reviews of every graphic novel comic book with phrases like "comics aren't just for kids anymore") I won't. I think he's a fantastic writer and every story in this collection, horror or otherwise, shines in one way or another.

In fact, he uses a few of the stories in this collection to subvert some very ingrained horror conventions; "Best New Horror" in particular plays with the tropes of the psycho family, not to mention the classic horror writer go-to of the publishing world. I honestly can't recall the last time that I felt as tense while reading a suspense story as I did while in the grip of "In The Rundown". And "Voluntary Committal" reminded me so much of "House of Leaves" that I couldn't help but love it.

That actually gets to one sticking point with this set of stories: I wanted more with several of them. Not just in the sense that I would have loved to explore deeper into the world of "Voluntary Committal" (already a fairly lengthy section) but also that a few of the stories just end. And while in some cases it could be argued that they do so in a way that does subvert those same tropes as mentioned before (again, here I'm thinking of "Best New Horror"), in the end I felt let down when it happened. Overall, however, I was so pleased that I didn't care. Joe Hill is the sort of writer who has such a strong command of the storytelling process that anything short of fantastic feels almost disappointing.

Review of "The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy" by Stanslaw Lem Item 16 - Finish 30 23 books

Ijon Tichy by Adoradora

This book was not my first experience with Stanislaw Lem, though it is the first book of his that I've read. I saw the 1972 Tarkovskiy film "Solaris" in college. And like everyone else that saw that particular film while in college, I pretended I understood it and discussed it with my equally unsure friends. The point here is not to self-flagellate for the delusions of adequacy of youth, but rather to give an idea of what my idea of Lem was going in to this book. I had always heard and believed (in no small part due to the obvious parallels between "Solaris" and "2001") that he was sort of the Polish Arthur C. Clarke. I have of course mentioned before my trepidation concerning these sorts of comparisons and rightfully so here as that reputation (at least as far as "Futurological" is concerned) is completely unfounded.

I've read a good number of Clarke's novels, I don't think it surprises anybody that I have always been a nerd. While Clarke was an excellent writer, the works of his that I've read all lacked a sense of humor or whimsy. It may be that he was a bit busy playing the Texas sharpshooter with his own predictions (try reading the introductions he wrote to some of his later works, it sometimes feels a bit embarrassing how self-congratulatory they can be) but he went in strictly for what people that I tend not to associate with would call "hard sci-fi". Lem on the other hand has a playfulness in this book that often crosses into the ludicrous. The artist who created the above picture of the narrator of "Futurological" said of Ijon Tichy (the star of "Futurological" and many other stories by Lem) that he is something of a "spacefaring Baron [Münchhausen]", which is as apt a description as anything.

Again, the danger in these comparisons lies in how limiting they are. For instance, Tichy's lineage includes equal parts of Alice as well Münchhausen: the bulk of this novel takes place in various dream states. It also has the sort of humor and social criticism that would make Vonnegut proud. And for that matter, there is an element of Dickishness (to steal a page from Robert Brockway) as well. Although it's probably more likely that Dick was influenced by Lem rather than vice versa and as far as I know it's just as likely that neither had any clue the other existed, I'm honestly not willing to put forth the effort at the moment to find out; to go back to Alice, I'd just as soon not go down this rabbit hole too far.

In the end, these comparisons really have no effect on my enjoyment of the work. At the same time I bought this book I bought another by Lem and can't wait to dive into it. I think I'll also have to see about getting Solaris out from Netflix to see if the intervening years have had any effect on it or me.