Rumors are swirling that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is “interested” in the role of The Riddler for Batman 3. I saw Inception twice over the weekend and was impressed twice. JGL is great in it, playing the icy operations specialist, the main character’s right-hand man. He’s not given a lot to do in the movie, but I was left with the strong impression that he could do more. I think he might have been able to pull off the main role there.

I’ve watched fan speculation on a third Batman movie featuring the Riddler and I’m often turned off, alarmed, at how absurd some of the ideas are. So few people seem to understand what makes Nolan’s Batman series successful. If Warner Bros. listened to the fans, this Batman series would more and more resemble the absurdity that the last Batman series plunged into, and which everyone rejected.

But I flatter myself to think that I get it, so let’s imagine that Christopher Nolan went insane and asked me to pitch him a Nolan-directed Batman 3, with the Riddler as the main villain. Here’s how I’d do it.

First, I would never call him The Riddler, I would never put him in a costume, I would never use the completely bullshit name, E Nigma. I don’t see any virtue in calling out who the guy is, or is meant to be, and I feel one of the weak points in Superhero movies is when people act in a manner that only makes sense if they know they’re in a movie. Christian Bale saying “I’m Batman!” in Batman Begins is one such moment. What’s important is the character of the Riddler; what he wants, what he does, and how Batman/Bruce Wayne reacts to him. Everyone in the audience will get it, there’s no need to call it out.

Second, I would accept as a premise that in the next movie, the cops are hunting Batman for the deaths caused by Two Face. I feel very strongly that Aaron Eckhart was the unsung hero of The Dark Knight and if I could find a way to bring him back, give his character some pathos, I would. Note that I would not be doing this because I felt that the sequels need “more villains,” I’d be doing it because I want to see more of that actor in this role and I feel his story isn’t over. So hunting the Batman for the deaths caused by Two-Face in the last movie let’s me kill two birds with one stone.

Because I want to create a tension within the Gotham Police Force. Gordon knows what happened. He knows Batman, he knows Batman didn’t do it, and furthermore knows Batman is a force for good. The city needs him.

But the rest of the cops do not know this. They want to arrest the Batman. There’s pressure on the street, there’s pressure in the media, and the cops want to show they’re the real heroes and Batman is a dangerous lunatic.

The spokesperson for this point of view is, well let’s cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt, why not? He plays a young, hotshot Lieutenant who, were it not for the events in the movie, might well rise to Commissioner in his own time. Gordon, in other words, loves him. Sees him as a younger version of himself.

This is the central tension of the first half of the film. Gordon is protecting the Batman while trying at the same time to lead his men. Tension between him and his men, tension within Gordon himself. Because he sympathizes with them. Not only sympathizes with Gordon-Levitt, sees himself in the younger cop.

Levitt’s Lieutenant is after the Batman, believes Batman is responsible for the deaths caused by Two-Face and is committed to bringing him in. And it should be clear to us, in the audience, that he’s good enough to do it. We may need an establishing action sequence were we see Gordon-Levitt on the job, cracking a very violent and complicated case. If that case feeds back to Batman to close the loop and bring everything together, so much the better.

We need to know three things about this character;

1: He’s highly moral. There’s no drama in his fall if we never believe he was an angel in the first place.

2: He’s tough. He might look young, and whip-thin, but his toughness is not entirely physical, it’s mental. He’s willing to do what has to be done, even it things get rough.

3: He’s smart.

There’s no tension if we don’t believe that Gordon-Levitt could really do it. And I want to make a character who could.

JGL is frustrated because Batman never shows up to thwart any of the bad guys JGL is chasing. Why doesn’t he? Because Gordon is tipping him off. Gordon is actively working to prevent Batman and this hot-shot Lieutenant from meeting and probably it’s frustrating both of those two characters. JGL for obvious reasons, and Batman because he’s taken on the responsibility of protecting Gotham, but Gordon–who has that same responsibility and is one of the few people Batman trusts and who sympathizes with him–is thwarting him when before he aided him. So tension between Gordon and Batman.

Unable to force a direct confrontation through the obvious means of just arresting bad guys until the Batman shows up, and suspecting that someone on the force is feeding information to Batman, JGL decides to bypass whatever covert lines of communication exist between the Batman and the cops, and communicate directly with Batman.

He does this by first going deep into the casefile behind Gordon’s back. Maybe even stealing cases from other cops, more tension. Tension between JGL and his colleagues. He’s deceiving them, even though they’re all after the same thing. He’s taking their cases and leaking information about them directly to the Batman in the hopes that Batman will show up at the scene of a crime, so JGL can arrest him.

JGL opens his direct line of communication with Batman by publishing clues about the cases in the newspaper. In code. Maybe even posing as the Joker. He hopes that Batman will see this, decode the cypher, and arrive at the scene of the crime. Both characters, Batman and JGL, are effectively working to thwart Comissioner Gordon’s attempts to stop them from meeting. JGL deliberately, and Batman coincidentally. Does Batman suspect that the clues are coming from a cop? Maybe.

Note that at this point in the movie, we have plenty of tension and conflict, in spite of the fact that everyone is behaving rationally, and according to a strict moral code. There are no bad guys yet, but we’re rapidly coming to a point where the tensions must resolve, and good people will be forced to do terrible things. This is not only Christopher Nolan’s métier, it’s also the running theme of his Batman series.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s plan works. Batman does find the clues in the newspaper and does decode the cypher. Unfortunately, so do lots of other people. So Batman never shows up because the clues lead members of the press, other criminals, other cops to the scenes of the crimes. Too much action at the scene of the crime for Batman to show himself.

JGL is convinced Batman is reading his messages in the newspaper. A mania is developing, but a shared mania, because Batman is reading the clues. JGL is simultaneously becoming more obsessed, and more right.

If his premise is correct (and we know it is) then the only solution is more complex cyphers, more complex clues. As he ratchets up the abstruseness of his clues, not only do fewer and fewer people decode them, he believes he’s developing a rapport with the Batman. Getting inside his head. Making clues only the Batman could solve means learning how to think like the Batman and in this, it means becoming like the Batman. JGL is going down the rabbit hole, but it’s the exact same rabbit hole Bruce Wayne went down. He’s moving toward an extreme existence, where men do terrible things to preserve what they believe in, but it’s exactly the same extremity Bruce Wayne was pushed to.

Unfortunately, JGL runs out of time. He runs out of cases. Gordon is on to him and without ever saying so publicly, because he cannot reveal either his connection to the Batman or the fact that he’s been protecting him, he starts denying JGL the time and resources he needs to covertly pursue this obsession.

JGL now has no choice. He’s so close to creating the perfect set of clues that only the Batman could decipher. He’s so close to drawing the Batman out, he knows he only needs one more shot.

Consumed by obsession and with no options left, he begins creating the crimes. Now he is really the Riddler. Now he’s become a villain who must be stopped. Innocent lives are in jeopardy, and he put them there.

Probably he starts small. He puts someone in danger, probably an actual criminal. Someone he knows is guilty of a crime, but JGL creates a fake crime and sets up the criminal as the fall guy. He creates a situation wherein the criminal can only be saved if Batman shows up. But Batman does not show up, and the criminal dies. JGL’s hands are now bloodied. This is the point of no return for him. He’s consumed with guilt. He was a good cop and he just killed an (technically) innocent man!

The only solution, the only thing that can relieve this guilt, is following through with his plan. Catching the Batman will justify it all. His set-up was too small-scale, he was too timid in his first attempt to create a crime, too afraid. Too much the Police Lieutenant. But now, armed with consuming guilt, he’s empowered to do something really terrible. Something large-scale. Something that puts the entire city of Gotham at risk. Gotham must be placed in danger because Gotham is Batman’s raison d’etre.

We are watching a good man unraveling before us. I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt would be perfect for that. His obsession with justice turns into just obsession. Everything else a means to an end. Like the Joker, he’s a mirror-image of Batman, but through a different mirror.

At this point, we leave the Riddler behind. We switch perspective to the Batman. JGL has disappeared and Gordon tells Batman everything he knows, what’s been happening. And now Batman must use all his skills, not as a fighter, but as a detective, to stop JGL before he kills again.

So…

Act One: The Lieutenant tries to catch the Batman using legitimate means. Ends with JGL hitting upon the idea of leaking clues about his casefile to Batman. At the end of Act One, we leave one level of obsession, and enter another.

Act Two: The Lieutenant follows through with his plan to communicate directly with the Batman, but is frustrated that the clues are never obscure enough. He runs out of cases, and must create his own crimes. When an innocent man dies, he becomes the Riddler, and we leave another level of obsession, and enter madness.

Act Three: The Batman tries to stop the Riddler.

I feel like this movie can only end with the death of Batman. This series can have no other logical conclusion. He must sacrifice himself to stop the Riddler, and this is something Bruce Wayne realizes must happen because otherwise there will just be more Riddlers. The only way Batman can save Gotham, is to give it up. Give up being Batman. Follow through the idea planted in the second movie that Batman’s only true function can be to inspire. Anything else begets obsession and destruction. Does this mean the death of Bruce Wayne? I leave that question for Christoper Nolan.

The Dark Knight sets an impossibly high bar, but I feel like it’s possible to create a film that stands on its own, while being in the same tradition and following the same themes as the first two movies.

That’s the main reason I’m online when I write, because I need to look up words. Not, I want to make clear, to check Facebook.

Being a writer in the fantasy genre means I am faced with problems I suspect other authors do not wot of. Rare is the time when I need to look up a word for something I know nothing about. If I knew nothing about it, how would I know there was a word for it? And I have a modestly large vocabulary to begin with. So, by definition, looking up a word is a frustrating process. Because the only words I ever need to look up are words for things I know exist, but do not know the name of. For instance…

I wanted to describe a knight in the mostly knightly manner possible because, in this new draft of The Book (the last before I put it online, I totes promise) I wanted to emphasize the knightly nature of the knights. So I imagine an extremely knighty knight in my mind. I entreat you to do the same.

He is certainly wearing armor, this knight you and I are imagining, and it’s probably gleaming plate. The plate armor has all sorts of bits on it, including a little concave metal disk, hung off the right shoulder (the left shoulder is protected by the shield) by a chain, designed to catch an enemy’s lance and deflect it, so the questing knight doesn’t have his shoulder dislocated or his arm ripped off by an enemy lance. That bit is called a besague. This I need not look up, I just know this stuff.

I know the central piece of torso armor covering the chest is formally called a cuirass. I know this because I watch a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan. So mostly I’m covered when it comes to this stuff.

But this knight we’re imagining, he’s probably on a horse and that horse has…some kind of…cloth…thing. He’s covered in white cloth with green trim. The cloth hangs down all the way to the ground like…drapes. Like…horse drapes.

Horse Drapes. You try looking up fucking Horse Drapes on Google and see what you get. You’re not going to get whatever it is I’m talking about, I’ll tell you that for nothing. No, “Horse Curtains” doesn’t work either, don’t bother.

So I need to look up the word and this is not going to be a short trip, this is going to be a long goddamned expedition and I’m probably going to end up in Google Books for 3 hours reading out-of-print books written in the 1880s on jousting in the 14th century. That’s how I found out what you called a prostitute in Medieval times. Trull, by the way.

Seeking dictionary.com, I minimize Word and launch Chrome.

“Sorry,” the laptop says. “No internets.”

“What?”

“There’s no internet here.”

“There was internet here yesterday!”

“Well, whatever with yesterday,” the laptop says. “There’s no internet today.”

“Huh. Is there any network at all?”

“Nope. I can’t see any networks.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yeah it is.”

“Sounds like there’s something wrong.”

“I think there is something wrong.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What…what do you think is wrong?”

“I dunno. Seems like maybe you turned networking off.”

“I turned it off?”

“Maybe!”

“I didn’t even know you COULD turn it off!”

“Well you can!”

“Ok. So…can you turn it back on?”

“I dunno, lemme see….

…nope.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe you can turn it on!”

“Ok, what do I do?”

“Well, sometimes there’s like a button on the front of the laptop. Check that.”

“Ok, hang on. I’m checking…I’m looking…

…nope. No buttons of any kind.”

“Well, ok. Um…sometimes there’s a key? On the keyboard?”

“Ok, I’m looking…hey! There’s a little button here with, like, a radio tower and little transmission waves coming off it!”

“Press that!”

“OMG Internets!!”

“Yay!”

“Yay!”

*hifive*

Now I can update my Facebook page! I mean…look up Horse Drapes!

.

.

.

It’s called a “caparison,” by the way.

The Lappy isn’t named yet. It should be. Windows annoyingly won’t let me give the Lappy a really long name like GSV The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival.  And unfortunately the Internet has yet to attempt the mammoth task of cataloging the names of all the Gods and Elementals in the Eternal Champion books. And clearly I’m not going to name it something obvious like Arioch or Xiombarg. So for now it’s Lappy.

Now, the process I do not love. It’s work. It can be a lot of work. Trying to work out Why Something Happens, or Why This Doesn’t Happen. I’ve never had writer’s block, but I have had Outlining Block where I’ve stared at the outline for an hour trying to figure out why the Hero wouldn’t just shoot the guy he would obviously fucking shoot.

This is something I can talk about for, literally, hours and that’s a good indication I should under no circumstance do so.

There was a point in the development of the book where everything at home became a distraction. Because I wrote at the same computer on which I watch TV and listen to music and surf the web and play games, all of these things made writing not impossible but very inefficient. Around the time I got really serious about the book, I bought a laptop.

I bought the laptop because I wanted to be able to take it somewhere, the library or a coffee shop, and work on the book. The point here wasn’t to work on the book “undisturbed,” but rather to have a specific place and time that I would come to associate with “writing.” I still checked my email, updated Facebook, but now these were little things that gave me a break from the intense experience of getting everything on the page. It took me months to finish the outline, but once I’d done it the book came very quickly.

It was not unusual, for instance, for me to be typing away at a high rate of speed, sitting forward in the wrought iron chair outside at Starbucks, with a look of something like hunger on my face. Certain chapters, once finished, would leave me in this kind of delirium where I felt like I had just been through what the main character had been through and I’d look around with what must have seemed an incredibly self-satisfied look on my face and everyone would be staring at me.

In other words, I had become the typical douchey writer tapping away on his laptop at Starbucks.

I did most of this during the Summer and there was a combination of the beautiful Southern California sunsets and the lovely warm weather that continued well after dark which meant I could write for hours, and did. Typically starting around 6pm and finishing around 10pm.

While writing I would often lose my sense of time. Hours would fly by. My heart rate would also rise dramatically and  sometimes I’d finish a chapter in cold sweat with my hands shaking.

“Man I’m an awesome writer!” I thought. Look at the emotional reaction, I’m having! This is so intense, surely it is a result of the profound insight I have into the human experience and the plausibility and rich emotions I’ve brought to the christ I think I’m having a heart attack I wonder how much caffeine is in this Frappacino doesn’t seem to be anything listed on the cup letmelookitupontheinternet. 90milligramspersevering6servingsinaventi

!^&%#(!^@%

One Venti Mocha Frap has as much caffeine as nine cans of Coke!? Who is the target market for this!? What demo has Starbucks identified who’d love to see through time and get heart palpitations but can’t get any good peyote?

Turns out my passion for writing was really just being addicted to caffeine and the sharp spike in productivity meant I had to spend more time on the back end editing to put verbs back in. And spaces. And, you know…vowels.

Caffeine is, as you probably know, an appetite suppressant but you don’t need to suppress your appetite when your caffeine delivery device also has 600 calories and a great deal of them from cream which is to say, fat. So the book was created through a strange ritual whereby I injected a double cheeseburger’s worth of fat and a 12-pack of coke’s worth of caffeine into my body. If the book takes off and I get to write sequels, I may die.

Eventually I switched to the low-cal version which only has 300 calories and things mellowed out a bit. I got a little less Coffee Writing done, but I enjoyed the mise-en-scène a lot more. I noticed the beautiful weather and amazing sunset more. I could see the Disneyland Fireworks every night and they were awesome.

I also noticed an abundance of really very attractive ladies who typically sat around reading and sipping coffee, some of whom were roughly my age!

It’s hard to chat someone up at a place you’ve picked explicitly to concentrate on writing. I wore headphones, for instance, broadcasting “leave me alone” so loudly that any homeless people who wandered by would just ignore me when panhandling. Unfortunately it also broadcast the same thing to the members of the fairer sex.

Occasionally I would write without the headphones on and in these times it wasn’t unusual for a woman to ask “what are you working on?”

I would smile and say I was working on a book, and this would produce a few minutes’ conversation in which I tried to be charming without actually talking about what I was writing because A: who gives a shit about what I’m writing and B: I could never find a way to say “I’m writing a fantasy novel” in a manner that didn’t sound like “I’m writing a fantasy novel.” I fantasized about putting on my comedic Cockney accent and saying “It’s got Orcs innnit!” but I’m not that brave.

Eventually, no matter how well the Chatting Up was going, I’d chicken out and get back to work. Maybe if I go back and start working on the sequel I’ll be more brave. “IT’S GOT ORCSES INNIT! LET’S HAVE A SHAG!”

Each time I would leave the house to go write, the Dog would complain that I was leaving her at home alone with the cats and each time I felt a little more guilty until eventually I gave in and took her with me. Other people did this, and I loved seeing their dogs lying at their feet, heads on their paws. I would say “Dee Oh Gee!” and they’d do that dog thing where they’d only move their eyes and their eyebrows would arch and I would sigh and get back to work.

Cookie isn’t one of those dogs. I mean, she can be, if we go for a run around the block first and she gets tired, but getting in the car just gets her wound up and she doesn’t unwind until we get home.

As soon as we got in the car, I regretted it. She freaks out in the car, don’t know why, I think she’s just really anxious to stick her head out the window but I’ve never been 100% sure she’s not going to leap out the window and so I don’t let her do it which is a kind of torture and I feel bad just writing about it.

As soon as we got to the Starbucks I…did the opposite of regretting it. Whatever that is. I deregretted it. I reversed my previously held position. Because man the women there loved my dog. Cookie is a Yorkshire Terrier and is therefore the least threatening dog imaginable without being a Chihuahua. She looks like a little teddy bear and in fact when you look up Yorkie breeders, their ads often say “genuine teddy-bear face.” Not entirely sure the breeders grasp the meaning of “genuine” but I doubt people buy from them because of their grammar.

Cookie loved the attention and I was happy to talk to people who love my dog and everything was going great. I set up my Lappy and wrapped the leash around the chair so Cookie had a little maximum radius within which she was free to caper.

There’s no real way for me to describe the typical Starbucks woman without sounding sexist, but the reality is, they’re almost exclusively beautiful which probably has more to do with Orange County than anything else. Many of them are very young and to my eye scantily clad, but all this does is make me want to read them a story and make sure they get into a good college. The women my age are almost all tanned and fit and look like they just got back from or are about to go for a run. I suspect there’s something going on here that I do not wot of. Some kind of cultural thing. The sample seems to be skewed.

I started writing and things were going well. I didn’t have my headphones in because I wanted to hear if Cookie started misbehaving somehow. A woman fitting the above description with the addition of long black hair pulled back in a pony tail fed through the back of her baseball cap, noticed my dog, and me writing and smiled. She reached down to pet Cookie, but Cookie did something I couldn’t see and she reached back.

“Does your dog bite?” She asked.

I smiled and shrugged and said “Zat ees nowt mai dawg.”

“What?” she said, frowning.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were making an Inspector Clouseau reference.”

“A who?”

I shook my head dismissively as if to suggest it was in no way important. “Indie band,” I said.

This resolved she bent down and petted the Cookie-dog.

It’s hard to describe the process as petting because I think implicit in the concept is that the petter is active and the pettee is passive. Whereas through this entire conversation Cookie has been STRAINING at her leash, bouncing up and down, making little “Urf! Urffle!” noises, her little black nose pointed at the woman across from me. It was to this the woman reacted earlier. The sheer eagerness.

I don’t know what it is about this dog. She loves everyone. Any time she sees another human of any stripe, she is desperate to lick their faces. It’s normally adorable but sometimes I think maybe she’s just insecure and desperate for approval. I have no idea where she could get that attitude from hem hem.

So the woman bends down and Cookie immediately tries to sort of hump her body over the lady’s hand. The woman laughs because this is so weird. I think she thinks my dog is attempting carnal relations with her wrist and she smiles in a kind of embarrassed manner.

“She wants you to pick her up,” I say. That’s what Cookie is trying to do, she’s trying to climb on the woman’s arm so she’ll be lifted up when the woman straightens up.

“Oh!” She said. She takes from my statement that I’m ok with this, and unhooks Cookie from her leash, lifting her up. This was, in retrospect, the critical moment that caused me to be kicked out of the Barnes & Noble a few breathless minutes later.

She’s now holding my dog at arms length and Cookie is kinda trying to swim through the air toward the woman in discreet lunges. The woman looks at me, smiling at my dog’s strange behavior.

“She wants to lick your nose.” I am, at this point, perhaps less than enthusiastic about this whole thing because I realize I’ve been reduced to a kind of Dog Translator. I just explicate everything my stupid dog is doing. I’ve become the voice of my dog’s Internal Monologue.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened to me. It’s not the fiftieth time this has happened to me. So I know what’s coming. Probably I should have warned the lady. She seemed nice.

I don’t know what it is about dogs in general or Yorkshire Terriers in particular, but when I tell someone “She just wants to lick your nose,” they always let her. It doesn’t matter how otherwise sanitary or dog-averse the person is, once Cookie’s little teddy-bear face is staring them down, they invariably lean forward and let Cookie lick their nose. It always happens.

“Ooaaugh!” she yelled, shocked, and covered up her face with her hands. She didn’t exactly drop Cookie, just let her fall into her lap. The woman shook her head once, violently, and made a kind of “shnrdrappt” sound with her nose as she blinked furiously and her eyes began to water.

Cookie spun around in the woman’s lap with her tongue lolling out, this look on her face like “Success! Where’s the next victim!?”

I know what she did. She did what she always does. I feel a little guilty because I wasn’t more specific when I said “she wants to lick your nose.”

She stuck her tongue up the woman’s nose. I can’t be certain, but I’d wager it was all the way up her nose. She doesn’t just stick it up there either, she worms it up there, slithering it up the nasal cavity until it feels like she’s tickling your brain.

Before you ask, the answer is; I have no idea. She’s always done this. Probably she did it to me when she was a puppy and enjoyed my squealing reaction and learned a bad lesson. It’s like she’s planting a flag when she does it. She only does it once, and then she’s done with you and wants to do it to someone else. Ah, youth.

The woman is laughing/crying and says something to the women seated next to her, her friend, “I don’t believe what that dog just did!!”

As she turns around to describe what happened, Cookie jumps off her lap and was now free and off her leash on the patio outside Barnes & Noble.

Cooke has always seen the leash as a kind of game. The rules are, I win if I keep her on it. She wins if she gets off it.

In this instance, she had clearly won and the reward was getting me to chase after her as she rocketed away. It’s amazing how fast those little legs can go.

Laptop forgotten, I immediately went after her. I’m in pretty good shape, but she outnumbers me in the leg department to the tune of 2. After about a minute I give up because, sure I could have kept running, but to what end?

She runs around the building once, staying mostly on the sidewalk and for this I am grateful. Eventually I wrapped back around to where we started and I thought she’d be Nose Spelunking with the other people on the patio but I instantly realized this was not the case when I saw a number of people inside the Barnes & Noble in various states of alarm and amusement.

She’s inside the book store.

Ok, well the good news is, I have her cornered and it’s not likely she’ll get back out. A little out of breath and trying not to show it, I calmly enter.

If you have a dog you probably can imagine what she was doing. She didn’t attack anyone or anything like that, she immediately began sniffing the floor intently, her long brown-haired body moving fluidly close to the ground like a Hippie Roomba.

She was smelling for other dogs, presumably, and this involves about a dozen rapid-fire *snifs* and then, since at this point her lungs are full, a rapid exhelation. Like this.

*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*PFHEW

Then repeat. It gives the impression of a very snooty dog because that big exhalation at the end sounds like a “Well, I never!” A kind of doggie indignation.

Pan the camera over to me and you see a guy who owns a dog desperately trying to own his dog without seeming like he owns that dog.

“Cookie!” I whisper. No good. She knows I’m there, she knows I know what she’s doing. She disnae care.

“Cookie come here!”

“PFHEW,” which is Dog for “Shan’t!”

It seems clear to me, in retrospect, that other people have brought their dogs in here and the guy who eventually asked me to leave had let OTHER people bring THEIR dogs in because eventually Cookie found the scent of another dog, and did what dogs do when that happens.

“Oh god,” I said. Now, I am a good doggy-daddy and so came prepared with two folded paper towels and two ziplock bags for just this emergency. But for some reason the people at the Barnes & Noble did not appreciate my foresight or her Genuine Teddy-bear Face because they reacted in a very alarmed manner as though dog pee was some kind of liquid Manhattan Project.

At this point, everyone in the store is watching including the people upstairs bending over the railing. Cookie having done her thing, she walks over to me and sits down proudly and waits to be picked up, which I do and, scolding her, almost run into the dude standing behind me.

“Sir I’m going to have to ask you and your dog to leave.”

I was a little taken aback by this for a couple of reasons. First, I was leaving anyway. Second, I’ve never had anyone talk to me like that before, I thought people only said things like that in the movies.

I resisted the urge to say “What dog?” It was the perfect moment for it and I could have deadpanned the shit out of it and Cookie was licking my face which would have made it extra perfect, but my heart wasn’t in it. The pee was the last straw and took the fight out of me.

I exited Stage Right and was happy to see my laptop was still outside and the pretty victim of Nasal Assault was gone, saving me some embarrassment.

I don’t go to that Starbucks anymore, I go to the one across the street from that one. They have free Wi-Fi and pumpkin scones.

I don’t take Cookie either. I’ve considered just taking a picture of her with the caption “MY DOG” to see if it gets the same response. Or I could take her and put a sign up on the table next to the Lappy reading “BEWARE OF TONGUE.”

I think that might send the wrong message though.

I say this because, as a guy, going to the doctor is notable. There’s a difference between men and women. At least one difference. Possibly more, but for the purposes of this post let’s stick with this one difference: guys don’t see doctors. Not as a rule.

Women see doctors. That’s the difference. A friend of mine said “I don’t understand why none of you guys ever go to the doctor!” I esplained.

“Larra,” I said, for such was her name, “you have to imagine what it’s like being a guy and 18,” which is when most of us learn this.

“First, there’s nothing wrong with you at 18. You feel great. You can do pretty much anything, for pretty much as long as you want, and then eat whatever you want or, alternatively, nothing for days and you don’t notice either way. Why on Earth would you go to a doctor?

“Also,” I said, because I really talk like this in person, “you’re going to live forever. You’re basically invincible and essentially immortal and you look at your Dad and he looks, you know…he looks like he’s been rode hard and put away wet, but there doesn’t appear to be anything critically malfunctioning. You look and your Grandpa and he’s active and happy, and then he drops dead unexpectedly and you look at your Dad and you both shrug and say ‘Huh.’” That “Huh” means “that was weird. Probably a freak occurrence. Million-to-one odds.”

The point is that guys tend not to teach their sons good habits when it comes to this stuff. We put off dealing with mortality as long as possible until going to the doctor scares the shit out of you because holy shit it’s been 30 years and God knows what kind of stuff is wrong you never knew about. Dad’s not fine, by the way, there’s all sorts of stuff that hurts that didn’t used to but he keeps his mouth shut because usually whatever it is just goes away. Usually.

To give you an example: I burst a blood vessel in my eye about 2 years ago. Never happened before, and if it’s never happened to you, let me explain. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t notice it, you can’t feel it, you have no nerves on the surface of your eye. But holy shit does it freak the people out who look at you. Which is a great way to freak YOU out. “Hey Matt, what’s the timeline like on the OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR EYE?”

“OH MY GOD I DON’T KNOW BUT HOLY SHIT IT MUST BE BAD! SOMEONE GIVE ME A MIRROR!”

Everyone sends me IM’s and emails to links explaining that I’m ok and it’s no big deal. My best friend who sat on the other side of the cubical wall gophered up to intone, insightfully:

“Yeah, but it never did that before, did it? You gotta wonder what’s different now?” He’s not saying that to freak me out…or rather, he’s not only saying that to freak me out, he’s saying that because that’s exactly how he thinks. How we all think. Stuff’s kinda, you know, winding down. But by God we’re not going to see a doctor! A woman would see a doctor. Really, she doesn’t have to “see a doctor” about a burst blood vessel, she only has to make a note to talk to the doctor about it the next time she sees him. This is an alien experience for a lot of us on the spear side.

The first time I saw Dr. Brunner, it’d been 25 years since the last time I saw a doctor and it took 3 hours for me to infodump on him everything I could remember that, had I been a woman…that’s right, I just said that…he’d have been getting all along. This is something called your “medical history” apparently.

So what’s the difference? As you probably know, the difference is: guys don’t have plumbing. Girls have plumbing and apparently they need to get their pipes rotated once a year or something. I cherish my ignorance on the subject.

The point is starting around, say, 12 years old, give or take, Mom takes you (and here I’ve switched who “you” is, so if you’re a guy don’t freak out) to the special girl doctor who doesn’t call himself a girl doctor because that would be silly and instead calls himself a…a gyroscope or something. A gyrodoctor. I’m sure that’s it.

Moms teach their daughters good habits, Dads teach their sons how to shoot guns. That’s literally true in my case, it’s not just a stereotype.

So my last visit to the esteemed Dr. Brunner, we talked about my weight. Which is high. Too high, and always higher than anyone guesses.

I exercise a lot. Like…a lot. But I’m not losing weight as fast as I’d like. So I do what I think you would probably do in my place, and I ask him to prescribe amphetamines.

He indicated that he didn’t think that was a good idea, and I forwarded the idea that maybe I should see a psychologist. At first he said “why do you think you need to see a psychologist?”

I said, “well, you know how, like…you, for instance, can see some food and, like…decide not to eat it?”

“Yyyyyes,” he said, exactly like that.

“Yeah. Yeah, I can’t do that.”

He agreed that I should see a shrink. He said he thought I’d do really well with Cognitive Therapy and I recognize there’s a problem and that’s a big part of making progress. And I’ve never been uptight about stuff like this. I’m open about whatever’s wrong or going on and I think that’s mostly because no one ever told me to be ashamed of whatever’s going wrong.

I should let you know now, we’ve still got a little ways before we get to the popcorn.

In the meantime, money being somewhat tight at the moment, I’m just trying to learn good habits.

For instance, somewhere in the last 20 years I accidentally taught myself that “hungry” is the state of not being full. It got to the point where, if I ever noticed I wasn’t full, I’d go eat something.

Discovering this about myself was step one, and step two is something I can only describe as a kind of Hunger Detox where I slowly rediscover what hunger really is. It’s tricky. But over the last two weeks I’ve gotten used to being neither hungry nor full and as a result I can go for a long time without eating. Without eating or feeling hungry or anything. Just…being normal.

Tonight, for instance, I IM’ed Austin, the aforementioned best friend, and said “I think it’s been about 24 hours since I’ve eaten anything.”

“You should fucking eat something dude.” You see why he’s my best friend.

“Well, I’m not sure I’m hungry.” This is literally true. “I can’t tell if I’m hungry-hungry or bored-hungry or just habit-hungry.”

Realizing there was no insight to offer on that, he said “holy shit this is the best Dwarf Fortress ever!”

I reasoned that if I were hungry-hungry, I’d know it, and so I should maybe eat something snacky to compensate. I have discovered that not all hunger requires a meal. And this is what snacks are for. Snacks used to be, not joking, the things that kept me full between meals.

I decide to have some popcorn. Ah-hah!

I bought some popcorn a few weeks ago, microwave popcorn, I think we all take that for granted, and I pulled it out to read the calories.

Now, even if the calories were clearly spelled out, I probably would have put the popcorn back down. But I confess I actually put it down because the popcorn confused me.

First, the calories are measured both Popped and Unpopped. Does this make sense to anyone? Why on earth would you want to know the caloric content of unpopped popcorn? The only possible reason someone could want to know that is if they plan on eating unpopped popcorn and that challenges my worldview.

It also measures calories in Servings. Two different measurements here. Servings popped, servings unpopped.  I am old enough to remember when a 12oz can of Coke was 2 servings, but I’ve gotten used to a  kind of sanity where “1 serving” is “one package” for anything that comes individually wrapped. Like popcorn. So one serving should be one bag.

One serving is not one bag. One serving is 3 ounces. 3 ounces of unpopped popcorn. How many ounces are in a serving? It doesn’t tell you. You can find out! But first you must convert ounces unpopped into cups of popped popcorn goddamn. I shit you not, you have to BOTH convert between popped and unpopped and ounces and cups. It’s a god-damned two dimensional matrix!

I give up and throw the popcorn away. I’ve probably burned more calories just thinking about how many calories are in the fucking popcorn than the popcorn has, but fuck it.

I have actual popcorn kernels, and vegetable oil. I look at the calories of that, and determine it’s way way lower than microwave popcorn and disnae require any maths.

I have never popped popcorn the, ah, natural way. Even before microwaves, we used Jiffy Pop which unlike a microwave was actually fun. I believe I understand the fundamentals however. I get a pan, I pour in the vegetable oil. I measure out some popcorn kernels into the pan, I turn the heat on medium, and I go watch Mythbusters.

If you are paying close attention, you may have noticed a critical missing element. Don’t shout it out! I’m keen to build suspense.

About 3 minutes in, I begin to hear popcorn popping. Success! Mmm…popcorn. It won’t have any butter, but that’s ok. As it turns out I won’t be having any popcorn. Jiffy Pop and microwaves both work essentially the same. Wait until there’s about 3 seconds between popping sounds, and you’re done. So I wait.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Everything is OBVIOUSLY working according to plan, requiring NO oversight on my part. There are some few of you reading this who know that while I am in some ways modestly bright, this is exactly the manner in which I am really stupid.

At roughly the five minute mark, no audible sign of the popcorn slowing, I realize something is wrong. But not with the popcorn, with the cats.

The cats are freaking out. They’re running around like it’s the goddamned catpocalypse. This is not a typical side-effect of popping popcorn. It is unusual for the cats to go screaming around at all. Often even when there are perfectly legitimate things to run around screaming about. Also, the dog is barking, at first I think at the cats.

She’s barking at me.

“Barky! Barky-bark!”

I sense something is wrong. I sense she’s trying to tell me something. She really does this.

“Cookie?”

“Barky!” *spin in circle*

“Cookie is something wrong?”

“Barky-bark!” *spin in circle*

I stand up. This is the universal Dog Sign for “We’re off! WOOO!”

Cookie sees the sign and immediately runs into the kitchen, because now we’re like hunters and the quarry is in the kitchen.

In the kitchen with the popcorn. The problem is in the kitchen with the popcorn. I begin to realize that there’s something wrong with the popcorn.

Ok, so the first thing I noticed was not the bedding of popcorn about 3 inches deep covering the floor. I can’t see the floor from my vantage point looking through the large window-like hole that allows someone in the living room to see into the kitchen. All I can see is the RAIN of popcorn, the constant fucking SHOWER of popcorn in the kitchen which continues unabated.

I failed to put the lid on the pan. I have inadvertently created what is effectively a kind of automated high-volume popcorn catapult currently sieging the entire kitchen en mass.

This is why the cats are freaking out. Their food dishes are in the kitchen which means it’s currently impossible for them to eat without being constantly pelted by popcorn raining from the heavens. I should say right now, everything’s fine. Brain is fine. No one appears injured.

I bring this up because while all the cats are running around, Brain chose this moment to leap up onto the room divider between the kitchen and living room, through the window/hole thing, and into the living room at such high velocity I did not at first recognize which cat it was.

His tail is on fire.

I’m not making this up.

Looking back, I have no idea how his tail could possibly have GOT on fire. Brian is tearing around the house, his claws are scrabbling on the hardwood floor, he’s making the biggest possible circuit he can, ears flattened against his head, just running as fast as his little kitty paws will take him, because he thinks he can run away from his own tail.

They say that, in a disaster, the people who make it, the people who survive, are the people who don’t freeze up. Who keep moving. Who keep thinking and trying to work their way out of the situation. I like to think I’m that guy. Certainly when the disaster is an earthquake, if keeping moving is the survival criteria, I’m going to be the most survingest motherfucker in California.

But I’m paralyzed. My brain is flooded with a cascade of conficting data and reason.

“Brain’s tail is on fire.”

“That’s bad!”

“Yeah. But how do I…how do I put it out?”

“Go chase after him!”

“Ok. Ok, yeah we could do that. What do you think would happen if I suddenly started tearing after the Brain?”

“Ahh…hang on…hang on.”

“Keep in mind, his tail is on fire.”

“Oh my god he’d just freak out more!”

“Yeah, so I shouldn’t chase after him. That would be stupid.”

“Well what’s the alternative?”

“Stand still?”

“Ok, well, that’s what we’re doing now isn’t it?”

“Mission accomplished!”

*high five*

This being really quite frighteningly close to my actual train of thought, I go investigate what was happening in the kitchen. Which is to say, I left the cat’s tail on fire. I’m normally a good kitty-daddy, please believe me.

So, the answer to your next question is…I don’t know. I don’t know how Brain’s tail got put out. It’s not on fire now. It was on fire. It was like someone stuck the goddamn Olympic Torch in my cat’s ass. But somehow, between then and dealing with the popcorn, the fire went out. Nearest I can tell, the other animals put it out. So, whatever else you may think, obviously my plan worked.

Dealing with the popcorn wasn’t really difficult, it’s just wading into the ankle-deep popcorn and turning the heat off. It was made more difficult by the fact that previously the cats were “OMG it’s raining popcorn” freaked out. Which is about a 6 on the scale of Cat Freakouts where fireworks is like a 9.

What’s a 10? Turns out a 10 is “HOLY SHIT BRAIN’S TAIL IS ON FIRE!!”

I have, I can show you, I have these large red scratches up my back and on my right shoulder. They are from the Pinky-cat. Because as I was trying to get to the popcorn and shut off the heat, she clawed her way up my back. Then, perched on my shoulder and kind of militantly purred the way only really freaked out cats can purr, I pulled her off my shoulder which caused the big red scratches there.

I turned off the heat. Considering how much popcorn is on the floor, and the countertops and on top of the fridge, and in the sink and behind the blender and inside the toaster, there’s an awful lot of popcorn kernels still in the pan.

It turns out, I put about 400 servings of popcorn in the pan. I think I figured “hey, no butter! I’m free to eat more without feeling guilty.”

And as it turned out, I do not feel guilty!

Wooo! Popcorn diet!

He's a Blackie Cat!

Four cats isn’t really four cats. If you have cats, you know this.

I go to Petsmart and the nice people there seem to enjoy chatting people up about their aminals. I try to remain coolly taciturn, but it’s hard when everyone in the store has brought their dogbeast with them. No one seems to bring catbeasts.

If you’re a sixty year old grandmother at PetSmart and this tallish, suntanned younger guy with great hair squeals “DOGGUMS!” You tend to smile proudly that someone is admiring your dog, albiet in a manner usually associated with 9 year old girls.

If, however, you’re a smoking-hot 20-something at Petsmart and this creepy, older, doughy white guy with great hair says “OMG Dee Oh Gee!” I think the situation is somewhat more complex.

Because the smoking-hot 20 something expects the attention. I mean she obviously expects the attention and certainly I wouldn’t normally mind giving it to her. At length. Several times a day with perhaps a 10 minute break now and then.

But she doesn’t expect me to ignore her and squeal quietly over her dog. Without fail the diabolically hot girl looks around. I don’t know why this is, because I am clearly reacting to a dog and she must know she has a dog with her, but I think she’s so used to being the center of attention that when someone of the otherwise appropriate sex seems not only to be ignoring her gender but her species as well, it’s disorientating. Maybe she’s not actually looking around, but turning her head left and right because she’s momentarily lost her balance and thinks it’s an inner ear thing.

I buy Feline Pine for litter and even though they sell it at PetSmart, the nice young ladies who scans my items are always astonished by it. They’ve never seen it before. The boxes are so light compared to clay litter they ask if the boxes are empty. Probably they’re being facetious. I started on the Feline Pine when one of my cats, Brain, was irradiated and became The Nuclear Cat for 12 days. But that’s another story.

They ask, they always ask, how many cats I have.

“I have four cats,” I say.

“That’s a lot of cats!” I usually get.

“Nah,” I say. And then explain Cat Math.

One cat is obviously one cat.

But two cats is really only a cat and a half. Cats are clean and lazy and mostly entertain themselves. Except for Blackitty, but that’s another story.

Three cats is basically 2 cats, and 4 cats is about 3 cats. Maybe less.

Dogs are different. It’s not clear to me that One Dog is even One Dog, I think One Dog is a dog and a half.

Two dogs is really three dogs, and three dogs is maybe 5.

The thing with dogs though is that once you get to around 5 dogs you get a Pack. I mean, technically one dog is a pack because you are the rest of the pack, but you only see dogs settle down mathematically once you hit 4 – 5 dogs in which case you’ve turned the Difficulty Level up high enough that you start to see some really sophisticated behavior from the Dog AI.

So now you know Cat Math and if someone says they have 4 cats you’ll know that’s not like saying they have 4 dogs. I can show you on your calculator where the C/D conversion button is, if you’d like.