Chapter 5
I had two more writers to meet. I quite liked Audrey. It must have been some accident to leave her to totter around on her cane like that. It was painful to watch, I certainly hope she is not in constant pain, I can’t even imagine an existence like that. Yet so many many people do. Many people my age are crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and some a good deal much younger. I’d love to live to five hundred but only if I never felt any older than fifty. Then at five hundred I just toppled over dead, no pain, no lingering. It almost sounds nice. How did she die? She just toppled over on her five hundredth birthday. I’d be like a Weeble, but I would fall down.
I went up to the last woman that I hadn’t met yet. She was by far the most stylishly dressed person here, Luke ran her a close second with his very expensive looking casual clothes. I’ve always wondered why a rich person needs expensive casual clothes. I get the suit, dress for success. But casual, well casual means comfortable to me. Nothing is more comfortable than flannel. Actually for a warm summer night like tonight, light cotton is more comfortable. But for ten months out of the year, flannel is pure comfort.
“Hi, I’m Laura. I own the bookstore. What do you think of toppled?”
“Toppled?”
“Yeah the word toppled, it somehow just seems fun to me. He toppled over. Fun to say, it makes me think of Chaplin or Keaton. Sorry, don't mind me. What is your name?”
I seemed to have confused her with my nonsense about toppled. I’m not drunk, this is my first beer in a few weeks so I'm not drunk. My brain is just stuck on that word.
“Hazel McMillan I write for Wine & Spirits. The website Wine & Spirits.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve never been to the site. Do you review wines on the site?”
“Some reviews, also tours of wineries and distilleries around the world. Interviews with vintners and distillers. Coverage of auctions.”
“I never developed a taste for wine, if I have more than a couple glasses I develop a terrible headache. I guess wine is a lot stronger than beer.”
“It can be but many craft beers are just as strong as wine, some even stronger.”
“If you like craft beer, The Brew House has thirty six beers on tap. Some of us will probably go down there tomorrow night. If you’d like to come. It’s very low key.”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t care for beer. The magazine does review some of the newer craft beers. But I don’t do those. I specialize in just wine and spirits.”
“I see, what brings you to the writers workshop are you going to be branching out from wine into fiction or a book about wine?”
“No, my boss paid for the workshop, we are always striving to improve both the website and our skills as writers. Our readers expect quality in what they drink and what they read.”
Jeez, she sounded like ad copy. I like to drink the occasional beer, but unless I started brewing it, I wouldn’t be much interested in reading about it. Unless it was like the history of beer.
“Do you write stories on the history of wine? Like when it was first produced, was it the Babylonians or earlier than that?”
“I have no idea, no we don’t have a story about the history of wine, we write about wines that can still be purchased today although the most expensive can be almost two hundred years old.”
“Wow, I would have thought it would turn to vinegar by then.”
“Not if it’s stored well, a bottle can last hundreds of years.”
I guess it takes all kinds of people to make up the world but personally I wouldn’t want to store the stuff let alone pay for it. I looked it up later, I wanted to know what the wines at auction sell for on average one to three hundred dollars. I thought it was an extreme waste of money until I searched for the most expensive bottle of wine, a 1945 Romanée?Conti bottle sold for $558,000 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2018. Now if this doesn’t prove just how absolutely insane humans are, I don’t know what will.
First off you must need to train your palate for years to be able to distinguish a good bottle of wine from an average bottle of wine. Aren’t you just training your palate to like what someone else ‘claims’ is superior. If you want to learn more about wine, the best course of action is to leave your palette alone. Have someone pour two glasses of wine from two vintages and in a blind taste test pick the one that you prefer.
If you have any luck at all you’ll prefer the cheaper one. If you don’t prefer the cheaper one, then I say it’s a matter of degrees. Is the hundred dollar bottle of wine ten times better then the ten dollar bottle, is the thousand dollar bottle one hundred times better than the cheap bottle. That is a lot of degrees to quibble over. Finally, the half million dollar bottle is it fifty thousand times better. That's a way to precise a human palate. I’d need to see some scientific evidence that something like that is even possible.
Of course I can imagine a scenario when I would pay a half million dollars for that bottle. I have exactly one half million dollars on me. I’ve been wandering through the desert for a week with no water. I have five minutes left to live if I don’t drink something. A man offers me a bottle of wine. I give him my half million dollars, I couldn’t care less if he hands me a ten dollar bottle of wine or the wine bought at auction for half a million. I drink the wine and save my life.
Now the end of my rant about wine. Wine is just like that DRM e-Book you bought from Amazon. You don’t really own it. It owns you. You now have to protect this bottle of wine from the world that wants to ruin it or take it from you. It has to be stored just so and if those conditions fail you might be protecting a bottle of vinegar. Of course you’ll never know until you open it. But how is it like an DRM e-book, you don’t own an e-book just a license that says you can keep it as long as Amazon wants to keep it on their servers or while they still make kindles. DRM e-Books are at best rented, read while you have it, because it can be taken away whenever. You agreed to that when you paid for it. Wine, once opened and drunk, hopefully you get a nice buzz because later you’ll realize I just peed away half a million dollars. Now if you are really rich you probably don’t care right. But at some point don’t you need to think, couldn't I have thought of a better way to use the half million dollars then for a really long pee.
To those that think I’m being unfair picking on wine, let’s look at men’s jewelry. It’s a colossal waste of money. Watches in particular, Swiss watches starting around five hundred dollars amping up into the million dollar ranges. First I know that time is money and every rich person’s second is incredibly valuable but compared to buying wine these watches represent negative value. An expensive bottle of wine tastes better than a one dollar bottle of ripple. But a million dollar swiss watch can’t keep time as well as a fifty dollar digital. People are insane.
Women’s fashion. Every woman has the right to feel good in their body and to reflect their style and who they are. Yet, they let some designer tell them how to dress and if that’s not bad enough. The same designer that told them to wear X in the spring, now just a year later tells them no X is all wrong for you, you have to wear Y in order to be stylish. If you really want to be stylish, go to a vintage store and try on a lot of clothes and decide for yourself, what you look good in. I’ll bet it is not exactly the same thing that a runway model looks good in. Unless you are a runway model, and if you are, you can just go naked, because you are already perfect, by the ideal that the fashion industry has perpetuated.
If you think I’m being unfair, how about we pick a subject close to my heart. Books, specifically rare books, are gigantic waste of money. Would I like a first edition hardcover of Lord of the Rings inscribed by Tolkien to CS Lewis. Sure I’d love to own them. But I already own the nineteen seventies Ballantine Books edition, the very books that I read the LOTR for the first time. It would be incredible to own books that Tolkien hand inscribed but it’d never have the memories of laying on my bed, devastated that my mentor, Gandalf had just fallen to his death. Instead the hard covers would be a piece of art. I’d feel compelled to place them in a glass case, open to the inscription for the public to view. I wouldn’t feel that I could leave them in my room only to be taken down and viewed with white gloves even if I did that daily, no I’d want everyone to see just how great a man Tolkien was, and that would not happen if they were in my room. But if they go on display, now I need security, because these are valuable. Priceless to me because Tolkien will never inscribe another set.
This rant is from my Obsidian notes that I went up and wrote down after the meet and greet ended and we adjourned for the evening. Yes I found Hazel pretentious, but surprisingly I liked Luke, the finance bro. Not just because he is looking to change to fiction, he was charming and self deprecating. I hope his new career as a science fiction author works out well for him, also it would be better for him if his back catalog continues to sell, I’m sure his SF won’t make him the kind of money he's investing how to have. Unless he gets incredibly lucky and someone options it for a movie or TV show.
Lastly I met Sven Brennan. Amy introduced and then made away at speed, which should have told me something, but my brain was still trying to process stiff expensive casual clothes, so it didn’t click until a few minutes into our conversation.
“Hello, Sven, military science fiction, I don’t suppose you read very much of it.”
“Honestly it’s not my favorite genre, but I really enjoy the Expanse and the Forever War, Starship Troopers is interesting as a diametrically set of ideas to what I consider good. Instead I prefer stories like Foundation where you out think your adversary rather than out gun them.”
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“See that’s where you are wrong, Starship Troopers is the greatest military science fiction ever written, perhaps the best science fiction ever written.”
“Taken as a warning about what we shouldn’t let happen, perhaps. Do you honestly think that only veterans should be allowed to vote? That the military should run the government. The last general we had in office warned us about the military industrial complex. If you believe so strongly in the military shouldn’t we heed his warning.”
“No, the very president you are talking about is why this book was written.”
“Yes, exactly. Eisenhower stopped the nuclear testing. So Heinlein wrote his ode to war. But the Soviets weren’t bugs, they were people with misguided leadership. If we had never used the atom bomb, there is a good chance that other countries wouldn’t have developed nuclear capability. I understand why the US developed it. If the Germans had developed it first we would have been screwed. But if Truman hadn’t used it. The other countries wouldn’t have known that it was possible. They used our weapon as a prototype for their own aside from being a country that unleashed a weapon of mass destruction against another country. Ironic that a country that actually used a weapon of mass destruction against another country, fifty years later attacked another country Iraq, because they supposedly had weapons of mass destruction. But news flash, that was just a lie, they didn’t have WMDs. War and the military should be used for defense. There should be no standing army. The states should have national guards which assist in case of disaster. The state should never drive its citizens to the point where they have to riot to get what they want. Politicians should remember that democracy is the worst form of tyranny. While democracy may be the best form of government, all governments above a tribal level are a burden on the people, and should be used sparingly.”
“Oh, my god you are so naive, you think the Russian and the Chinese don’t want what we have. So you’d just lay down and let them take it. The military is the only thing that keeps us free.”
“Bowing down to the military, isn’t being free. It’s the opposite, it’s a dictatorship. In your Utopia, only the military can vote for the military. It’s a one party system. That’s a dictatorship, one that has been drilled starting in boot camp into obedience. The only defense against that system is civil disobedience. Then your system responds with corporal punishment and if that doesn’t correct the individual to the fascist’s point of view then capital punishment is the final solution in your idea of a utopia. But my response is how is that any different to living under Chinese or Russian rules, will I be any less free, no. So I reject your view that the best way to beat the ‘enemy’ is to become the enemy. The best way to beat any enemy is by out smarting said enemy. How do you do that? Usually by doing something that they don’t expect you to do.”
Now I know why Amy walked away. She didn’t want to get involved in this, she also probably didn’t enjoy getting lectured to by this guy. I might have thought that Flynn was a little pretentious, but this was a whole new level. But this is part of the writer’s collective income stream and I don’t want to interfere with that in any way, no matter how offensive I find Sven, personally. He is entitled to his own opinion. If I didn’t allow that, then I’d be as fascist as Starship Troopers. Heinlein would have hated Star Wars, he would have thought the wrong side one. I only hope that he is such a bad writer, that no one wants to read his book. Nor be influenced by his writing.
“Well, Sven, I thank you for an interesting discussion, but I better be heading up to bed. Maybe we can continue this tomorrow.”
When I looked around the tent, most everyone else was gone or in the process of leaving. Monique was helping Amy wrap up the leftover snacks, so I joined them and started transporting all those food into the house. It didn’t take but twenty minutes for us to move it all inside. While Bianca picked up some trash and put some chairs out. My little spiel was first up tomorrow morning, trying to sell everyone on the protest ebook.
So after I had finished helping Amy and Monique, I went out and helped Bianca put out some lawn chairs, while Ezra set up a small but powerful portable speaker and microphone. Then I went upstairs and wrote notes for a long time before heading to bed.
***
I was up early the following morning, I’m glad I had taken the time to meet all of the writers. This morning I was going to ask for their help. Knowing a little bit about each of them, I’d know which ones to be disappointed in if they refused, and which one’s I’d be happy didn’t participate if they refused. No one likes speaking in front of a group. Me too, I hate it and I had real butterflies in my stomach, so I went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea while Amy finished cooking breakfast. While I waited for the water to boil, I carried some of the already cooked food out to the table, putting it on the hot plates that run down the center of the table to keep the food good and hot.
Returning to the kitchen, I made my tea and while it steeped, I carried out the rest of the food.
“Laura, do you think they’ll let that Sven into the collective?”
“What, why would you think that, Amy?”
“Because he asked Bianca if the collective had any space for another writer.”
“What did she say to him, Amy”
“She said that she would have to get back to him.”
“Well, Amy, maybe she just didn’t want to ruin the party.”
“That guy is a creep, Laura. Did you see the way he was eyeing that pretty playwright? Like she was grade A meat and he was the wolf. Tell her not to let him in, Laura.”
“I can’t Bianca asked me the other day if I wanted to decide which writers move in and I told her no, that it was more important that the writers all get along. But you should have a say as well. So just tell Bianca your concerns about him. Tell her if she’s looking for another writer, Tyson Ricci, a magazine writer for “Adirondack Lives” is interested in a spot. He wants to become a novelist. I’ve also met him and he is a very nice man.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I considered him as a suspect in Lachlan’s murder. But of course he didn’t do it, Kirby did it. But I did drag him here under false pretenses. So I kind of owe him a shot at a spot if the writers like him. Okay, I have to go get ready and find out how Lucy’s interview went last night.”
***
I was supposed to be in the tent at five minutes to ten, and it was just ten minutes from now. If any day that Lucy was early, I hoped it was today. My girl did not disappoint. In fact the store was already open, I saw some of the authors from last night browsing the shelves.
“Hi Lucy, I only have a minute, I was wondering how the interview went yesterday? Did you like her?”
“Yes, very much, I’m sure she’ll be great, she has bookseller experience. A lot more than I do as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t worry about experience, you were born for this job. Project Marginalia, a physical e-Book store. Those are great ideas, Lucy. Don’t hire this woman if you think she’ll intimidate you, we’ll find someone better.”
“No, I’d be a horrible manager, if my first decision is to not hire the best person for the job. So I asked her to be here at noon today while the workshop is on a lunch break to talk to you. She has an opportunity for us, that you need to discuss with her.”
Bianca came rushing down the stairs.
“Come on, Laura. You are on in like five minutes.”
“Okay, coming Bianca, Lucy we’ll talk later. Don’t worry everything will be fine.”
So I rushed out to the tent, I had some index cards with a couple of notes. To make sure I didn’t forget any of the points that I wanted to go over. I was one hundred percent sure that no one I would be speaking to, were anywhere near as liberal as I was. So I had some things that I really wanted to stress and I wasn’t going to blow getting some help by going into a liberal rant about the horrible state of the country since dumpy trumpy became president. I certainly wasn’t going to say that all ICE agents are fascists, even though I would guess about eighty percent are. Some of them probably just need a job and would do whatever they had to do to keep their family fed, clothed and safe. All of the workshop attendees were here and about half of the writers from the collective. I hoped that I didn’t bore them because this was going to be pretty much the thing that I said to them the other day at dinner.
“Hi, I’m Laura, which I guess you all know, because we all met last night or we live together. I asked Bianca if I could lead off because I have a proposal I’d like to put before you. The events in our nation over the past couple of weeks have been really upsetting, seeing Americans getting killed on TV, by federal agents. I’m sure they have been upsetting you as well. So I want to put together a free e-Book, a guidebook about safe nonviolent protesting, starting with strategies like sitting, linking arms so it’s hard for the authorities to just drag you away. What to wear, strategies like protecting your head. Not making provocative moves, that make the police think they are about to come under attack. These federal agents are supposedly trained. But no one has trained the protestors how to stay safe. I don’t want to watch anymore Americans killing other Americans. I’d like to say that I don’t want to see Americans killing anyone, but I fear that is too much to hope for. You don’t have to be an expert in protesting or civil disobedience to write an essay for the book. You can just write what seeing this has done to you, or your community. I can’t guarantee that every essay I receive will go into the book. I was an editor for thirty years, I’ll have final say what goes in. I’ll tell you what won’t go in, any calls to violence, or any condoning of violence. I’ll also be asking a couple of lawyers to look over the book before it’s published to be sure we aren’t open to lawsuits or breaking any laws we nonlawyers don’t know about. But it’s our first amendment right to free speech and protest. I just want everyone to be safe while they are doing it. I’ll be happy to take any questions, now or if you prefer to speak to me privately I’ll be around all weekend. Thanks for listening.”
Sven stood up and he looked livid. “Doesn’t law enforcement in this country have enough to do without old hippies writing manuals of violence, encouraging their followers to break the law.”
“Sven, I’ll assume, I’m the oldie hippie you are referring to. My name is Laura, which I reminded you at the beginning of the talk. Clearly you weren’t listening when I distinctly said a nonviolent manual or when I said I wouldn’t accept any essays that call for violence or condone violence. I feel like I say this everyday now but let me repeat it for you because I’m not sure that you have ever heard of it. “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Asimov. I firmly believe that, so as not to have any more protestors killed, I’d like to make them the most competent protestors in the world. These people are not domestic terrorists, they are Americans who disagree with what the government is doing, which is their right. No executive order can change that. You need an amendment to the constitution to change that.”
There was applause and a few whistles from the collective writers who had heard it all before. Em yelled “You tell him Laura!” Sven sat down and didn’t say another word. I really hadn’t made a friend, first I criticized his favorite novel, now I attacked his storm troopers. Four of the visiting writers promised to email an essay by the end of the week.
