#33 The Beast of Kandahar

The Beast of Kandahar
Landed in my Backyard
It winked and said I was a 'Tard
We ate some chicken Fried in Lard

The Beast of Kandahar can See
What people Do So Secretly
It writes things down DiliGently
It kicks up High Just Like Bruce Lee

The Beast of Kandahar is Best
At Finding Out at the Behest
Of Men who Know and are Well Dressed
You are Almost Under Arrest

The Beast of Kandahar
Can Spy with Its Electric Super-Eye
All things Below And Snitch and Lie
To Creep-Spies who Identify.

The Beast of Kandahar
And I are Best of Friends
We go to Dinner, Drive Around
It soars On High Without A Sound

The Beast of Kandahar
Flies High Above The USA
And Saves the Day from Terrorist Elves*
To Save the People From Themselves

The Beast of Kandahar
Sends Pictures of My Neighbor
Sunbathing Nude in Her Backyard
I Love The Beast of Kandahar

* Give me a break, what I needed something that rhymed with "themselves"

graph paper stuff

Cervantes.
Verisimilitude; scintillate; Valdes Leal; sardonic; taciturn; obsequious
Book Notes: Basim forbids dancing.  Lamya dances for Sabir to spite her husband.

Reading A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham.

Here are some notes, written on green graph paper.  It makes a great list of things I know nothing about:

Le Cid; Gogol; Lermontov; Turgenev; Chekov; Byron, Shelly, Walter Scott; Thackery; The Revisor; Congreve; Wycherley; School for Scandal; Kotzebue's Kleinstadter; She stoops to Conquer; G.B. Shaw; Ruritania; Katzenjammer; Sacher Masoch; The Hounds of Heaven; Oblomovism; Eugene Sue; flipperty-gibbet; Julien Sorel; El Greco; Resurection by Tolstoi; Octave Feuillet or Cherbuliez; Flaubert; Maupassant; Concourts; Huysmans; Princess Mathilde; Herzen; Bakunin; the reign of Alexander II; Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov; On the Eve; A House of Gentlefolk; Anthony Trollope; demagogues; compte rendu; Balzac; Jane Eyre; The Waverley Novels; peroration; Saint-Just; Bolsheviks; Charles Frohman; The Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; Polynesian Garden of the Hesperides; the book Main Street; epigrammatic; mythomaniac; Le Cousin Pons; sycophancy; turbid 

stuff written on graph paper

1. Saturnine countenance
2. Alexandre Tharoud, Erik Satie: Avent Dernieres

Scotty wore a red shirt

Scotty wore a red shirt. He beamed down to the surface. He survived. You will survive too. You are not an extra, you are a recurring character.

this ungodly hour

Who is awake at this ungodly hour? Who guns their car down empty boulevards? Who types hyperbole into the ether, in darkness, into phantom glowing keys? Who drinks alone in front of dying embers? Who stands the watches of the night, in restaurants, gas stations, Walmarts, cop cars, army bases, shotgun shacks and marble kitchens? Who is awake at this ungodly hour?

graph paper notes

Dunsanian?
Pearl Buck?
Charles Dexter Ward?

For the book, give characters ticks (nerves) or other maladies, real or imagined.

random things written on graph paper

Ovid's "Art of Love"?
clapboard?
the lurking future may not come at all
plug hunters
tiny triangular sandwiches

Today I Did Something Really Dumb

Today I did something incredibly dumb.  Not costly dumb, not anything with serious consequences, just something really dumb.

I had to drop our car off at the mechanic's at their overnight drop-off place, where you leave the keys after hours so in the morning they can get to work on it right away.  So I drive up to the garage and they have a key drop-off slot.  I get out of the car and lock the door.

But as soon as I go to drop they keys off, I find they have these envelopes where you have to fill out a form and it says, "You must sign here." 

Well, I had nothing to write with; the pens were in the car, and the car was locked, so I walked to the grocery store (nearby, just a couple of blocks away) and I get a pen from a cashier, fill out the form and walk back.

I put the keys in the envelope and put the envelope in the slot, and walk home.

Now I know you see what I missed.  I had the keys the whole time!  Something about the pending putting-the-keys-in-the-slot made me think I couldn't get back into the car.  I had the keys in my pocket the entire time. 

I didn't realize my mistake, even after returning to the mechanic's place, putting the keys in the envelope/form and putting the keys in the slot.

I didn't realize my mistake during the walk home.

I only realized my mistake while telling my daughter about why it took me so long to get back later that night.  I started telling her and I suddenly realized how dumb I had been.  I still can't believe I had the keys, but thought for some reason I couldn't get back into the car to get a pen.

My Bold Statement against Censorship

Here is my bold statement against the bipolar state of sex in consumerism and half-assed censorship!  They try to hide the cover of Cosmopolitan with a metal plate, but they cannot stop me from expressing my distain for all things prudish and cowardly!  What a rebel I am!  I put a copy of Cosmopolitan over every other magazine on the magazine rack.  Try to hide the objectification of women now!  They would sell us the image of glamour, but they would hide it from us at the same time?  Not with Dan Manning, performance artist on the loose!  What a bold statement!  What avant-garde disdain for provincial sensibilities!   

Or, I was just bored, whatever.

Happy Friggin' Veteran's Day

# THE MAN-MADE WORLD

Everything in the man-made world is an idea or thought. The wording of a billboard, the font used on a website. Roads and walls and books and plastic happy meal toys are all based on the thoughts of other human beings. The screen you are staring into, the windshields you peer out of are all the result of ideas piled onto ideas onto ideas, back to the development of glass to the idea that fire might be controlled and made useful. The very thoughts that we think are the result of the thoughts of others.

Our habits are based on the habits of others. What we find acceptable is based on the subset of activities found acceptable by the humans around us.

But WHY does the man-made world even exist? There was a point not long ago when we just scrounged around for food, reproduced, and fended off threats from cold, predators, and other bands of humans. Back then there was just one or two motivating factors:

Where am gonna get more food?
How am I gonna make babies?

Now we have specialized skills, or at least, we are put to specialized tasks. We fix roads or drive trucks or sell trucks or design trucks. We paint or preach or type numbers into spreadsheets. We hunker down in cubicle dungeons, or fly jet airplanes. Humans have decided that other people can grow the crops and raise the cattle, others can slaughter the cattle and others can drive the meat around. Others can process it and package it. Others can cook it. Others can bring it to our table. We get to enjoy it with steak sauce.

How many different ideas are involved to make it possible to walk into a restaurant (restaurants! What an amazing concept) have someone prepare a steak, have someone else bring it to us, all for some pieces of paper with the pictures of long dead leaders on them, or even more amazing, in exchange for the honor of holding on to a rectangle of plastic for a few minutes, and then to return it to us, physically unchanged.

Why this world of music, conditioned air, PEZ dispensers and intercontinental ballistic missiles?

We are primates with the ability to record our thoughts. We can put down our thoughts so that others can later read those thoughts, build on those thoughts, or dismiss thoses thoughts as bullshit.

I know that there is no intrinsic meaning to any of this, yet my life is meaningful (at least it seems meaningful). Life is rich and full of wonder. The man-made world is full of amazing ideas. Amazing concepts and things. Art and sports and literature and video games. That along with the NATURAL world makes eighty or a hundred years on this planet as a human pretty sweet.

I write this in a Panera Bread. I know, what am I doing in an outlet of everything corporate? I don't know, I have some time to kill while I wait for my next appointment. When I'm done writing this, I'm gonna read a book that was published in 1874. I'm going to get lost in a story about people who never existed. How glorious that there are books. How thankful I am for the aproned man who just cleared away my bagel tray. What miracle, my cell phone. It is Friday. It is good to be alive!

Really Long Virginia Woolf Sentence

Here is a doozy of a sentence from To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. Smarter people have already written too many smart things for me to add anything useful, but this book is fantastic. Nothing happens. There's a whole section that describes the goings on in an empty house. The maid is sent to open the place back up, and here's a sentence (a single sentence) describing her singing some old song to herself as she works alone in the long-empty house:

"Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again."

 If you haven't read this book, read it.

A Cheap Buzz

When you stop drinking after years of drinking, sobriety becomes its own type of madness. A long period of Clarity of mind is in itself a strange high, and it can be fun, as long as you can fold it in on itself. Thinking too much is a cheap buzz.

A Shabby Trailer By The Side Of The Road

Your religion is like a house of mirrors. You are born into it, as a child you are told it is real, and you believe in it. But once you get out of it, you see it is nothing more than a shabby trailer run by carnival workers. Even if you wanted to, you can't just decide to go back and live again in illusion, because you'll know it's fake.

He slept peacefully, with an untroubled heart.

There was once a very corrupt official. I know that sounds fantastic, but it is true. There was once a corrupt official. He took bribes at every opportunity, without the slightest feeling of shame or guilt. All day long influential men would come in and out of his offices, getting promises for votes, and dropping off drafts of legislation that would be put forth and enacted without much change to the wording.

 Everyone was happy with this arrangement. The government men were happy. The lawyers and CEOs and weapons manufacturers were happy. Almost everyone was happy, except the poor people. The poor people and the working people were not happy. But that was no concern to the official, who slept in a large bed with his fashionable wife.

unique novel idea!

I find it amazing that no novel has every been written about an orphan or orphans. I think making an orphan the lead character would work so well. I wonder why no one else has ever, in the history of novels, ever thought of that. ;)

Story sample: "The Scouting Party"

The Scouting Party

View more documents from danmanning

From my book, Firewood for Cannibals (and other stories)

free audio stories

Do you like stories? Sure, we all do. I would like to recommend a podcast from ClarksWorld Magazine. If you don't listen on your iPod, you can listen right from the web page. If you DO listen on your iPod, you should listen to it at double speed, because the narrator Kate Baker reads kinda slow. Some of the stories I don't like so much, but their last two picks are pretty good:

"Pack" by Robert Reed, and "The Fish of Lijiang" by Chen Qiufan

Anywhoo, Happy Labor Day and all that jazz.

(read my books)

~

What I'm Reading

I'm reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988). He packs a lot into every enjoyable paragraph. So far it is very entertaining. I'm also reading, as a palate cleanser between chapters, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury titled A Medicine for Melancholy (1959). So far my favorite is the story "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit", about six poor guys who save up to buy a white suit so they can take turns walking around like big shots.

My manuscript is coming along nicely. Lots of characters and sub-plots and other shenanigans.