Originally published in The Inner Swine Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2008, the following remains sadly accurate.

Yup.

A typical exchange at Casa de Somers:

YOUR HUMBLE EDITOR: All right, let’s go.

THE DUCHESS: Uh, is that what you’re wearing?

YHE: (glancing down at his ensemble: black T-shirt, blue khaki shorts, a pair of black sneakers) Uh, yeah, why?

TD: Maybe you would consider wearing the clothes I put out for you.

YHE: Wait a second. . .the clothes you put out for me?

TD: Yep. Right over there.

YHE: (crossing to the dresser where a blue T-shirt and a pair of black khakis sit) These clothes?

TD: Yep. Soooo much better.

YHE: (staring for some time at the new clothes, expecting something to happen) So, let me get this straight: This T-shirt and shorts is better than this T-shirt and shorts.

TD: Yep.

YHE: So again, let me clarify: I am thirty-seven years old, and you are putting out clothes for me?

TD: Yes!

YHE: And the clothes you are putting out for me are basically identical to the clothes I have chosen for myself.

TD: Except, you know, soooo much better.

YHE: And yet I am supposed to change clothes.

TD: Well, obviously.

YHE: I can’t see any difference.

TD: Of course not. You’re incompetent. If you hadn’t married me, you’d likely be dead by now.

YHE: Stipulated. I don’t see how a few dozen incidents of reckless drinking and one incident involving superglue and my underpants have anything to do with my ability to dress myself.

TD: The glue and underpants thing was disturbing.

YHE: Solved! I don’t wear underpants any more. At all. Ever.

TD: We are going to put a pin in that, but we will come back to it. For now, just change clothes.

YHE: First you have to show me the difference between this pair of shorts (indicates the pair he is wearing) and these shorts (indicates the pair neatly folded on the dresser).

TD: (pointing at the pair on the dresser) I’ve already explained. . .these are so much better.

YHE: Okay. . .let’s stipulate for a moment—just a moment—that these shorts are somehow subtly better than the ones I’m wearing. They lack the microscopic imperfections and possibly have an imaginary sheen of the favored pair. The issue remains that I have a basic human right to dress myself.

TD: Sure, if you do it correctly. What you’re missing here is this: If you grant that the outfit is pretty much the same either way, then why not just change?

YHE: Uh. . .wait a second. . .

TD: You’ve already wasted more time arguing than you would have used to simply change clothes.

YHE: The principle is not a practical consideration of available resources, woman, but a consideration of my dignity. I’m a grown man and you’re putting out clothes for me like I’m five years old. And beyond that, since there’s no difference between your outfit and mine—

TD: (takes breath)

YHE: —I know, I know, so much better, but listen! Since there’s no appreciable difference, you’re basically working on the assumption here that any choice I make will be a poor one, simply because I am ill-equipped to handle my day-to-day responsibilities. You probably don’t even look too hard at what I’m wearing. The assumption is that if I picked it out, it must be unsuitable. This is madness. I’m old.

TD: Believe me, you’re young at heart. You used to think Converse Chuck Taylors were appropriate for every occasion.

YHE: Still do. If they didn’t warp my feet into painful orthopedic conditions, I’d still wear them all the time.

TD: I rest my case.

YHE: What that is, you see, is a matter of opinion. You can’t make blanket dressing rules based on an opinion.

TD: It’s not an opinion. Chuck Taylors, like your current ensemble, are heinous. Now we’re late. You know being late makes me cranky. Please change immediately.

YHE: We have not settled this. I see no reason to change.

TD: (raises eyebrow)

YHE: Aside from the threat of physical pain, which grants no points, I mean.

TD: Oh, for god’s sake. . .Look, some people have taste, and some don’t the ones who don’t. . .like you. . .are forever claiming it doesn’t matter what you wear, because they can’t see the difference. They’re taste-blind. This would be the same thing if you were colorblind and I told you something was blue and you said it was a matter of opinion.

YHE: No, because blue is a scientifically measurable frequency of light reflection. Taste is completely subjective. Unless you want me to believe that jackoffs like Christian Soriano have some sort of measurable scientific ability, instead of just being, well, jackoffs.

TD: I am unfamiliar with this term, jackoff. And I think Christian Soriano is adorable! Like a little doll. Or a puppet. Now put on the shorts.

YHE: So, basically this boiled down to you think I have bad taste and don’t want to be seen in public with me wearing my own taste.

TD: And I will start slapping you until you cry unless you change immediately into the So Much Better Shorts.

YHE: (meekly pulling his pants off) Actually, that’s a good marketing idea. We could start selling So Much Better Shorts. They’d just be regular shorts from the store, except. . .so much better.

TD: Are you mocking me? Because I can make you wear the pink shorts and the cornflower blue tank top.

YHE: No! Not the. . .punishment outfit.

TD: Then be quiet.

YHE: Yes’m.

There are rules.

There were a lot of things that bothered me about Gillan Flynn’s Gone Girl. I enjoyed the book, but there were aspects of it that bothered me – most notably, the inconsistency of Flynn’s POV writing. The main problem is Nick, who somehow contrives to not think about his mistress once during the early sections of the book told from his point of view. I mean, we’re in his head. His burner cheater phone is blowing up all the time. It would be more than natural for Nick to make a passing mental reference to his mistress, in his own thoughts. Yet he doesn’t. We’re supposed to believe that a man in the pickle Nick finds himself in would maintain bizarre mental discipline concerning the existence of his youthful side piece – as if he knew we were reading his thoughts.

Of course not. Flynn needed to keep that twist under wraps, and she was telling the story from Nick’s POV. The only solution was to simply, and incredibly (in the old sense of not being believable), have Nick never once think about her until it was time to reveal her to the surprised reader.

IN short, Flynn’s got a POV problem. And she’s not the only one. And it’s one of my pet peeves.

Breaking the Deal

The thing is, when you write a story from a certain POV you make a deal with the reader. They know you’re going to control information. But you’re promising to remain consistent. If you offer us a glimpse into the head of a character, you’re telling us that we can rely on that information … or be given a good reason why we can’t – say, insanity, or because the POV narration is actually a confession being recorded somehow. If we’re supposedly getting the unvarnished thoughts of a character, playing cheap tricks like them miraculously not thinking about vital relationships or other facts is just weak writing.

Even with Unreliable Narrators, there is a deal – albeit a deal only fully revealed to the reader at the end of the story. An Unreliable narrator must still be consistent, must still have rules. You should be able to go back and re-read their sections and see where they fooled you, and how.

There are worse examples. In her novel The Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L. Sayers informs the reader that she deliberately won’t mention a clue that would be perfectly visible at a scene she’s describing. She just says fuckit and tells you in no uncertain terms that if she mention the item, you’d be able to figure out the whole mystery, so she’s just not going to, but didn’t think she could get away with just not mentioning it because it would be obvious. And then, to add insult to injury, she implies archly that you shouldn’t need her help:

“(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)”

That is what literary scientists call bullshit.

He Told Them

There are other examples. Have you ever been reading a book and a character is asked an important question, the answer to which will explain much and go a long way to solving mysteries, and the next line is a variation on “He told them”? A made up illustrative example:

“Mr. Somers,” Captain Awesome said in his booming voice,  “I’ve solved the mystery. There is one vital clue you missed.”

Somers wiped blood from his face. “What’s that? For god’s sake, man, tell me!”

He told him. When he was done, all the blood had drained from Somers’ face. “That one sentence has changed the universe,” he said solemnly, then belched.

Again: This is what scientists call bullshit. It’s weak. It’s a lazy way of getting out of a jam, as a writer. It’s a trick I’ve used, but I feel dirty about it.

I’ve also played a dirty trick on you, because from now on you won’t be able to read a book that uses these tricks without noticing, and, like me, you’ll hurl the book across the room and hiss bullshit!

look on my works ye mighty and despair

by Jeff Somers

I have found a small green caterpillar in the back yard and decide I will keep him as a pet. I put him in a mayonnaise jar, holes poked into the lid, with a leafy branch for sustenance. A few days later I notice a red scar along his body. I think he’s dying. I release him back into the yard and am sad for days. He is not the last insect whose existence I step on.

My brother and I have just been informed that alcohol burns. We spend the afternoon in the kitchen taking bottles out of my parents’ liquor cabinet and trying to light shots on fire. We burned a lot of whiskey. Miraculously, despite the fact that we didn’t try to hide any of this, we didn’t get into trouble. I suspect because it was ostensibly an educational moment.

My mother didn’t want us to have pets when we were kids because she was pretty certain she would end up taking care of them. To satisfy us, we bought a goldfish. Our first fish lived for a year, which I now understand is remarkable for a goldfish. When he passed away, we carefully put him in a jar with water and buried him in the backyard. We bought a new fish. Which died within days. So we buried it in a jar with water with slightly less ceremony. We bought a new fish. Which died. Then another, and another. The backyard of my mother’s house is littered with jars filled with decomposed goldfish. Then she finally gave in and let us take in a neighbor’s cat that they were planning to put to sleep.

In grammar school I started playing Dungeons & Dragons because our teacher had the books in class. Two friends and I decided to create and market our own role playing game. The result was the spectacularly bananas INFILTRATE, which was a complete set of rules with a crazy construction-paper cover. We named the ‘company’ after a portmanteau of our last names and decided we were going to be famous. The most amazing thing is we actually wrote the fucking rulebook. I mean, jebus, I was twelve years old.

Back in college I actually started jogging a little. Not seriously. I doubt I ran more than half a mile, ever. I did it mostly as a dramatic way to have some time to myself. I used to run in the golf course on campus at night. It was cool being in a semi-wooded area in the darkness, alone. One night I sat down by a pond for a while feeling curiously sorry for myself, and came home with a tick embedded behind my knee. Chaos broke out. Word spread throughout our coed floor and before I knew it about fifteen people were in my room examining the tick and offering suggestions for getting rid of it. We burned it, we put nail polish on it, one guy took a penknife, ran it over a flame, and tried digging the fucker out. I could actually feel it squirming there, which remains one of the worst sensations of my life. The next day I had to take my bandaged self to the clinic and have a very bored nurse extract the tick and re-bandage the area. She never batted an eye at it. I supposed she’d seen dumber things.

In Eighth Grade I briefly became a Crossing Guard. Details are fuzzy, but I remember it being a big deal. Only the Eighth Graders could become Crossing Guards. You got a cool belt to wear. It kind of sucked. I did it for about a week and had the first of many why the fuck am I wasting my time with this bullshit moments that led to my mediocre and just-barely-adequate academic and professional career. I regret nothing. Anyway, after a week, I quit. And my teacher pulled me aside and gave me this ridiculously over the top speech about how I’d regret this decision for the rest of my life. That I was making a huge mistake. Even at the tender age of thirteen I could barely keep the smirk off my face. Was she fucking serious? Quitting the Crossing Guards was going to wreck my life? Jebus. I still get all outraged, decades later.

I read The Lord of the Rings. I write a book.

My next-door neighbor has moved off to college and left his pet cat behind. His parents keep her in the basement and talk about having her put to sleep because they don’t want to care for a cat. I go over and visit. Every time I go down into their basement she comes out meowing and likes me to bend over so she can stand on my back. I have no idea why she likes that but she purrs when I do it so I do it every time. Three weeks later she is my cat. She comes into my room every night and sleeps with me. Once I forget and lock my door and she is trapped in the room all night with me. When I wake up she is sitting on my chest staring at me. She immediately begins to cry.

I now have four cats. One sleeps with me and The Duchess every night.

In Seventh Grade my class does a Shakespeare video project, with kids dressed in costume and performing scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. I get assigned The Taming of the Shrew with a girl whose name I cannot remember. We have to come up with costumes. Mine involves tights, which seems to make sense though I am extremely disturbed. I find myself wearing a pair of pantyhose and being filmed. Somewhere in the universe there possibly exists a videotape of me wearing pantyhose and doing Shakespeare. This is terrible knowledge to carry around with you.

I am nine years old. I am challenged by my eleven-year-old cousin John to urinate in the basement. I accept.

I am some undetermined age under my bed eating crayons. I have no reason to be eating crayons aside from the belief that they will make my poop multicolored. They do not.

My friend Jeof gives me a cheap acoustic guitar. I do not tune it or make any effort to learn how to play. I sit at home and invent chords on my own. They are terrible chords. Chords awesome in their strident discordant terribleness. The guitar eventually breaks and I throw it away. Years later The Duchess buys me a new guitar and some lessons. Those awesomely terrible chords are lost forever.

When I’m a little kid of some unremembered age I beg and plead for a Huffy dirtbike. All the kids in my neighborhood have dirtbikes, except me, and it causes me a lot of angst. On my birthday my parents amaze me by giving me a Huffy dirtbike. I take it out on its training wheels to ride. Two older kids come and steal it. Just like that. Knock me off the bike and one of them rides away on it faster than I thought possible. That is still my takeaway from this event: How inhumanly fast that kid rode my bike.

I can remember when I was a kid, when I would eat too much my mother would tell me I was going to “explode”. I always thought this was just a colorful expression, until one summer day when we were having some sort of party and I’d been eating hot dogs and hamburgers for hours, I went in the kitchen, opened the fridge, and started drinking soda from a bottle. I got a few swallows in before vomiting energetically onto the floor in a violent manner. There was no nausea. I just threw it all up. I’d exploded.

Years after releasing the green caterpillar back into my back yard, I have an intense dream. This is unusual because I do not normally dream, or remember dreams. In this dream I am standing in my backyard and a large, beautiful butterfly comes and settles on my shoulder. It sits for a few seconds flapping its multicolored wings, then flies away. It is the caterpillar, transformed. I wake up crying.

KEYS TO LOST SLEEP

So, we’ve made some friends on our block with some neighbors, and it’s generally a good thing because the neighbors we’re friendly with all like to drink a lot. They’re generally all good people I’m happy to know, and the ones who aren’t we just sort of wave at and smile and keep moving – always keep moving. That’s the secret.

Since we’re living in a society and I am nothing if not a team player, we do favors for our neighbors and vice versa. For example, we all have copies of each other’s keys so that when the husbands (occasionally, wives, once, cats) come stumbling home, pantsless and blind drunk, with no house keys anywhere in sight, we can help each other out.

So this morning I am asleep, and the phone rings and wakes me. I look at Caller ID, and it says the grocery store across the street is calling. For a sleepy moment I actually wondered if they were calling to tell me they knew I ate that grape without paying for it six years ago, or that I’d once clogged the toilet over there when we were having our bathroom remodelled.

Then, I woke up sufficiently to not answer. Because it was the grocery store.

Anyway, the message clicks on and its my neighbor, who has locked himself out. Neighbor X is a great guy who shares my love of pre-dinner cocktails, sarcastic remarks, and that third, ill-advised bottle of wine, so naturally I got up and went downstairs to get his keys. And poor Neighbor X is standing there freezing his ass off in his pajamas. I did him the courtesy of not asking why he was at the grocery store at 5AM in nothing but his pajamas, because that’s what neighbors do for each other, natch.

The moral? Having friends rips you from your warm bed at 5AM. Having no friends doesn’t. Make of that what you will.