Read(ing): The Road

Jesus Christ, who the fuck does Oprah think she is? Jack Ketchum?

Here I am, home alone with my wife out of town. I'm thinking, "Fuck, yeah. I'm gonna hook up my iPod to the stereo, drink some whiskey, crank the soundtrack to Once, then rock out later to some Jonathan Coulton, make a kick-ass steak dinner for one, do some chores so I look totally awesome when my wife gets back, and play Fatal Frame 2 alone in the dark until I freak out and have to turn on all the lights in the apartment and stay awake until 11 o'clock in the morning when I can finally close my eyes without seeing ghosts coming out of everything."

Instead, barely halfway through that list, I found myself staring at a can of vegetable chili.

"I only have four more cans of chili. I have a bunch of canned tomatoes, but I don't like tomatoes. And if the power goes out and there's reason to believe it's never coming back on again, even if people don't know I have batteries and canned food and water enough for a few days (in case of a earthquake--always be prepared), it's only a matter of time before they break in and take my stuff. And my crowbar is in the car, so I can't expect to man up like Gordon Freeman or anything. Shit, is it even safe to mention that on the Internet? I guess it doesn't matter, because there won't be an Internet so no one can ask.com, 'Where can I find canned food and shotguns?' And when the sky goes black and rain is ash, what's the point of knowing who Gordon Freeman is? My iPod is only half charged, so I only have two hours left of listening to music if the world ends, assuming an EMP won't wipe it out. Is that how EMPs work, or is that 24 logic? Maybe I should invest in vinyl. How prepared am I to survive a nuclear attack, really? I'm not even sure where my wife is, but I know she's staying one night at a hotel so she probably has no food at all. If I lost my glasses, I'd die. And if somehow I made it to the ocean to rest in peace, it would be cold, black, birdless, and in Santa Monica."

Some people are scared of oven timers. Some people claim not be scared by anything. I'll admit to an embarrassing agnostic superstition myself (I don't believe in monsters, but I keep the window of possibility open), though in general, I'm pretty jaded. There's usually a voice in my head that says, "Oh, sure. They're eating a baby. Ooooh! Scary!"

But there's something about The Road that subverts that internal narration. The Mike/Joel and the 'bots in my head get cancelled, and without warning it becomes, "OMFG! THEY'RE TRAVELING WITH A PREGNANT WOMAN AND ROASTING CHILDREN ON A STICK! IS SHE EATING CHILDREN TOO, OR IS SHE JUST A CAPTIVE FOOD RESOURCE!? EITHER WAY, THAT'S GOD DAMN SICK! JESUS FUCK! WHY?"

You know things are bad when I double-punctuate and switch to all caps.

I have viewed, read, and listened to three things in my life that have horribly scarred me forever. I consider them all very well-executed, but I can't recommend them. With the exception of The Road, I'm hesitant to even mention what they are. I don't want to encourage anyone.

But The Road is a post-apocalypse novel (Yay!) that was part of Oprah's book club (Boo? I guess. Just because she's "The Man"...who...encourages people to read books. Never mind). It's "literary" (Actually, when there are descriptions, they're slick--that probably doesn't need quotes.) and high-profile, as it was also mentioned once in Games For Windows magazine. So I feel it deserves a special warning.

Do not read this book. I picked it up at the library and it had no quotation marks. It may not even have had commas or capitalization. My memory's a bit fuzzy on that point.

And for fuck's sake, if you are prone to nihilism, existentialism, or just wondering what's the point of it all, do not listen to this book. It's just that good. At this point, I'm hoping the boy turns out to be a figment of his father's imagination, so I can toss my headphones off, breathe a sigh of relief, and say, "Well, that was dumb."

That would be okay.

Freelance Sign Editors Needed

Here's a weird thing I brought back from Japan. Bidding for the merchandising rights is well underway. You should know that the three tanks are brothers and the same one is always attacked by the cat.

As a result of my father-in-law climbing onto the roof of his house through a second story window during a rainstorm, I spent a lot of my trip in a hospital in Himeji. When not watching him attempt to lower his brain age, I visited the "Language Cure Room," where I learned doublethink and Fox Newspeak.

Himeji is famous for two things: Himeji Castle and yakuza. (A 16-year-old boy stabbed his mother in the throat in a local restaurant on Tuesday, but I am told this sort of thing happens all the time.) Whenever I return from Japan, people invariably ask me, "Narraptor, did you see any yakuza?" Indeed, I believe I did!

The alleged sighting took place a few hours away in the bar of the Osaka Ritz-Carlton. It's the type of place where grapefruit juice costs as much as a cocktail, and where the lounge singers amuse barflys by singing, "Welcome to the hotel...Ritz-Carlton!" After their opening performance, they announced that someone in the room was celebrating a special birthday. Someone just turned three!

Sitting next to the woman holding the birthday boy was a Japanese man wearing a white suit, impassively watching as everyone clapped along to the birthday song. Now I'm not saying that just because he took a kid to a cocktail lounge for its third birthday means he's a gangster, but at the very least he wanted us to think he was one.

I made a point of renting Miike's The Great Yokai War while in Japan, forgetting that it came out on DVD in America a few weeks ago. My wife translated all but the last 15 minutes for me, and other than the mysterious philosophies of the bad guy ("To destroy the evils of truth and love!") I think I understood everything. For those of you who don't know, Yokai is basically a Japanese Labyrinth or Mirrormask, but the monsters come from real folklore. And it's got a giant mechanical hellforge that allows the antagonist to merge kappa and tengu with discarded motorcycles and the like to create demon bikes and helicopter Terminators with chainsaw arms.

Will someone please watch it with the subtitles on and tell me what the ending meant, other than "I'm Takeshi Miike! Ha ha!"