Luke Skywalker: Like My Father Before Me

Everyone knows, at the end of the Star Wars original trilogy, the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. The Emperor, who’s just been watching this whole thing like a parent at their child’s baseball game, laughs and tells Luke to kill Vader and “take you father’s place at my side.” But instead Luke throws away his lightsaber and announces,

“Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a jedi, like my father before me.”

Isn’t that a strange thing to say? “Like my father before me.” This is Luke’s crowning moment, his great defiance, proof that he is too strong, at least too morally strong, to be pulled to the dark side. And he chooses to say, “Like my father before me?” His father is currently laying at his feet, minus one arm. Even before that, his father was a sith lord, half machine, and a total jerk who had turned to the dark side and been mean for literally decades. Yes, Vader was once a jedi, but he totally failed at it. So, Luke Skywalker, I ask you, seriously ol' buddy, why associate yourself with Vader in your moment of triumph?

Literally everyone has parents. And all parents, being human and fallible, screw up in lots of ways. And their children share their DNA and were (if the parents stuck around) influenced by their parents’ screw ups. So every child eventually asks themselves: am I my father’s/mother’s son/daughter, doomed to fall to the dark side like they did?

When Luke refers to his father, the jedi, he is referring to the aspects of his father that he, at that moment, has successfully embodied. He learned the pitfalls that destroyed Vader, and he now has faced those same pitfalls in himself and succeeded.

Literally everyone can do this. We cannot run from our own DNA, but we can all learn from our parents’ mistakes, succeed where they faltered, and become what they failed to be. Once we’ve achieved that, we can proudly declare our association with them, with the parts of them we have chosen, with their jedi selves. Even though they totally failed at being jedi, we can become what they were meant to be: a jedi, like my father before me.

What If

What if something terrible happens?

I have never been in a fight, not a real one anyway. But in my head I've met my end in a plethora of ways: sword fights, fist fights, bottle fights. Just like the eight thousand and one times I've been stabbed in the back while out for a walk (in my head). Just like the six hundred times I've been abducted by aliens or monstrous beings from other dimensions (in my head). I do this on a moment to moment basis. I wake up doing this. I fall asleep literally to a lullaby of this. This is the soundtrack of my life constantly playing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always playing.

I brush my teeth imagining what it would be like if I were arrested for someone else's crime. I floss daydreaming about the apocalypse. I shave to the melody of “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” What if the subway derails while we're going over a bridge? What if my permit to live in Canada is revoked? What if my wife gets sick and we don't have the money to heal her? What if one of the friends I've shown my novel to betrays me and somehow steals the copyright to it, leaving me so depressed that I can never write again? What if robbers? What if cockroaches? What if disease? What if an accident? What if storms or hail or war? What if mind-reading paratrooper shapeshifter alien vampires?

There are people who prepare for unfortunate situations. They do this by recognizing likely scenarios, planning accordingly, and not thinking about the millions of extremely unlikely possibilities that there is no way to actually prevent except by locking yourself in your house (and even that won't prevent all of them). These people innately know a basic truth: no amount of mental questioning can ready you for the unpredictable, unlikely madness of what actually happens. Not even for vampires. When the apocalypse comes, it will be bizarre and unimaginable. When calamity strikes, it will always be a fresh wound. I've never, ever, readied myself for a real event using 'what if.' I’ve never realized a fatal flaw in a plan using 'what if.' I’ve never soothed myself regarding something scary using 'what if.' All that 'what if' does is multiply anxiety a thousand-fold in an infinite loop of mental creation. I create planets in my own mind, filled with nothing but anxiety. I’ve tossed aside basic physics to make room for more worry and fear amongst the limited neurons in my brain. And I know that this massive construction project is never going to be worth the effort.

But it’s habit now. Years of practice. Decades of teaching myself that literally anything can be a prompt for 'what if.' By the time life taught me that this habit was useless, I had already become an expert. So, what now? Is all this space in my brain permanently wasted? Maybe not. What if an expert in making bombs used his skills to defuse explosives? What if an expert in robbery used his knowledge to thief-proof people's houses? If those things can happen, maybe an expert in 'what if' can turn a method for creating anxiety into a tool for producing hope.

What if something good happens?

The Coming of An Accountant to the Great Plains of Merna

The great plains of Merna, though they were, as their name implied, great, and had held that title since before human language had been invented, had never in their long career seen the likes of Rayfield the accountant.

A thousand years before Rayfield was born, a herd of centaurs from Tafril came through the forests of Ern into the wide, rolling hills of the great plains of Merna. Their armor and spears glittered in the bright morning sun as they marched, crushing the grass and the dirt into a road of mud in their wake. Their captain, the largest centaur ever born, galloped in the lead, standing nearly four meters tall. They marched the length of the plains, shaking the earth as the went, and then continued onwards to some horrible war where they all died.

But still, nothing quite like Rayfield the accountant had ever come to the great plains of Merna.

A thousand years before the centaurs’ march, a meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere with a tail of fire crackling behind it, and by the time it touched the ground of the great plains of Merna, it had burned away until only a crumb remained. But it was a fiery crumb, and rain had not fallen on the plains for nearly a year, so the grass was easily lit. The fire burned away six square miles of dry yellow grass before it stopped.

In the fresh ash, strange new plants grew up, for the meteorite had brought more than fire down with it from the outer reaches. These new plants grew quickly, and their leaves glittered like diamonds. Their shining refractions of light drew flies and men alike amongst the fields of otherworldly plants. None ever returned.

The king of the nearby kingdom of Brendal lost seventy of his best knights and his only son to those fields. He wept a single tear for the knights, but for his son he mumbled two words to his most trusted sorcerer: "Burn them." The sorcerer, who had been beside the king since the day he was born and had never spoken a single word to any other man, knew what the king meant. He hurried away and locked himself in a secret room in the tallest tower of the castle. Heart-rending melodies floated from this tower for three days and nights. Then, an expendable scout was sent to check the great plains of Merna and the fields of glittering plants from which no man or fly had yet returned. But return the scout did, reporting that he had found nothing of the shining plants but ash on the bare soil. Normal grasses soon grew up again, and no one ever spoke of the glittering otherworldly plants, the seventy knights, or the king's son ever again.

An unfathomable number of beautiful, horrible, and somewhat-impossible things had happened in the great plains of Merna. And so many other, mundane things had happened as well. Nearly every eventually had taken place there at least twice. But nothing even slightly similar to the coming of Rayfield, the accountant, had ever happened.

To his credit, Rayfield was no ordinary accountant. He was the most skilled of his firm, and for that reason he, and he alone, had been entrusted by his jealous colleagues with the prestigious and usually deadly task of confronting Valentino the gangster about his back taxes. However, the blunt honest fact was this: nothing like Rayfield the accountant had every happened there because nothing as mundane as a shortish man in an overpriced suit had ever gotten lost enough to be able to arrive at the great plains of Merna.

Charming: Our First Evening in Cairo

In Canada, you need to be polite. In Egypt, you need to be charming.

My wife and I moved to Cairo in the heat of July, without a single friend in the country, any knowledge of the language, or the slightest idea where we were going to live. We had four boxes of possessions, acceptance letters to the American University in Cairo, and a reservation at a hostel downtown.

Our first evening staying in the hostel, we headed out to find food. Being unfamiliar with any local food and knowing that the next day would be hectic, we found a Macdonald's (yes, there are Macdonalds' in Egypt) and ordered a pile of hamburgers to last us several meals. Then my wife went back to the hostel with the food while I looked for a grocer which might have bread and jam for breakfast.

When I went back to the hostel, I passed through the front room, which, like all Egyptian businesses, was manned by one employee and two of his friends. When they saw me, they chuckled and patted each other on the back. I asked if there was something on my face, and they replied by saying that they were not expecting to ever see me again.

With this mysterious conversation still playing in my head, I went to our room and found my wife happily munching on a hamburger. "Why are the people in the front room laughing at me?" I asked.

"Oh," she smirked and raised her eyebrows glibly.  "When I came back, they asked me 'What happened to your husband? You left together, but only you came back.' So I said, 'I sold him.'"

"You sold me?"

"Yes, sold you. And they laughed and asked, 'What was the price?' And all I did was hold up the bag of Macdonald's."

"What did they say to that?"

"They said that I got a good price."

It was then that I realized that I had chosen the best traveling companion in the world. And that realization was proven right, over and over, as we found a flat, bought furniture, and arranged our new lives. There was no heart in the country that she could not charm or strike fear into. I optimistically believe that some of these powers have rubbed off on me, via her and the Egyptians I befriended, but honestly I will always be an apprentice in the subtle ways of the Egyptian wit.

How To Snatch Food From The Kitchen Without Getting Caught

Humans need to eat food. Sometimes, humans want to eat food even when they don’t need to. Sometimes, those humans share a kitchen with someone who doesn’t want that food to be eaten. The culprit could be your significant other, your parent, or a roommate, but their motivation for stopping you is always one of the following:
*They want to save the food for a special occasion.
*This particular food is actually an important ingredient for something they plan to cook.
*You specifically instructed them (in a moment of desperation or madness) to prevent you from eating the food, no matter how much you might beg or plead, since you lack the willpower to stop yourself.
*They want the food for themselves. (This is the most primal of the motivations, and, for that reason, the most likely, even if they claim one of the above.)

Regardless of which of these applies in your particular case, you need not feel guilty for snatching food. This is natural human behavior, survival of the most fit. If you are able to snatch food from the refrigerator without your competition catching you, that makes you the fittest. Food snatching is simply nature taking its course (pun intended).

Here are my tips for winning the title of fittest.

1)  Know your strengths and weaknesses. How much can you eat? How fast can you eat it?
2)  Know your competition’s habits and schedule. Any spy will tell you that this is the key to any espionage: know where your target is in space and time, and how long they are going to be there. How long are their showers? Could you consume an entire pie in that amount of time AND hide the evidence?
3)  Eat strategically. Your primary goal is to prevent your competition from ever realizing that you snatched anything at all, and the best way to do this is to nibble along the edges of anything too big to make disappear entirely. Instead of cutting a square piece from a half eaten cake, cut a long, thin piece from along the already cut edge. In some cases, one bite from every container in the refrigerator will draw less attention than five bites from one container.
4)  Minimize noise. Restrain the urge to scarf, gobble, or burp. Chew deliberately. Open doors slowly. Avoid noisy doors entirely. Maybe set a spoon aside somewhere, since opening the silverware drawer can be quite loud.
5)  Hide the evidence. Put the half-finished jello bowl in the back of the refrigerator. Rinse off the spoon. Bury any wrappers under the trash in the trash can.
6)  Move the food onto a smaller plate if you’ve eaten half of it. This makes the food item look just as big as it did before in proportion to the plate it rests on. This also works with zip-lock bags, Tupperware containers, and even cups.
7)  Pay attention to your breath. Smelling like peanut butter when there are five peanut butter cookies missing will blow your cover immediately, no matter what plate the cookies are on. Brush your teeth, or just keep out of smelling range of the competition.
8)  If caught, make outrageous lies. Crafty lies will make the competition suspicious. Ridiculous lies will distract them. Therefore, blame the family pet(s), the neighbor’s children, ghosts, trans-dimensional warping, spontaneous casserole combustion, etc.

A Halloween Story

Once upon an autumn, long ago, there was an especially wicked demon whose name no one remembers. They only remember him by the name of the holiday he helped create: Halloween.
Now on this particular autumn, Halloween had spent the whole harvest season in a small town, spoiling crops, pushing people into wells, and trying to convince half-drunken men to kill each other. Seeing these things happening so often and without proper explanations, the village priest teamed up with the village witch to capture the demon that was obviously running amok. Now, witches and priests don’t usually get along well, but it was possible in this case for two reasons: one, because this priest and witch were a brother and sister who had chosen wildly different career paths, and, two, because their mother was one of the people who had been pushed into a well.

Thus, they set a trap for the demon Halloween. They used branches from an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes to build a cage that the demon could not escape from. It was bigger than a bread box and smaller than a golden retriever, but light enough to carry. Then the priest simply stood at the edge of a nearby cliff and said, “Golly, I would die if I fell from here!” Within moments, the demon came rushing from the town to push the priest off the cliff to his death. But the witch was quick, and she leapt out of the bushes with the cage and caught the demon inside it. She slammed the little door behind it and locked it with some enchanted twine. And thus, Halloween the demon was caught.

The brother and sister agreed to keep the caged demon in the church basement for half the year and in the witch’s basement the other half of the year. Each time they carried the cage between basements, the demon Halloween begged to be let out, calling upon Christian charity and the gods of the earth for mercy. Twice a year he begged, all the way to the church, then all the way to the witch’s house. And indeed, he did slowly prevail upon the kind hearts of the witch and priest, even though they never forgot what the demon had done to their poor mother, and the evil that he would surely do if he were released.

And so they hatched another clever scheme. By this point, the priest and witch were quite old, so the whole town listened to what they had to say. They told all the townspeople that on the day the priest moved the demon’s cage to the witch’s house, they should all dress up like hooligans, ne’er-do-wells, and demons. Disguised thusly, they should go throughout the whole town pretending to be vile and evil: breaking things, laughing at death, pretending to push people into wells, and blackmailing the other townspeople with threats of violence to get valuables (which were, of course, to be prepared in advance).

The townspeople thought this was odd, but they trusted the witch and the priest, so, on the day appointed for moving the demon’s cage, which happened to be October thirty-first, they did as instructed. When they demon begged to be set free, the priest promptly opened the cage door without another word. The demon leapt out and scurried away, laughing and planning to do mischief. But when he came upon the town, he found that things had changed in the decades of his absence.

Demons bigger and scarier than Halloween filled the streets alongside every form of villain imaginable. Vandalism, violence, blackmail, and pushing people in the wells! Evil on a scale that Halloween had never dreamed of. Grotesque faces all around, laughing at death and taking what did not belong to them. The joy that Halloween felt at first quickly transformed to dread. Everyone committed evil without prejudice. What horrible things might they do to him? He did not wish to be pushed into a well or robbed. The faces all around were terrifying and suggested acts of evil they could do to him that even he could not imagine!

And so he fled back to the only place he knew he would be safe from evil: surrounded by the branches of an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes. He dashed back into the cage, which still sat at the waiting priest’s feet. “I’d like to stay here, if you please. Shut the door. It’s the only place in town safe from all that evil. I don’t envy you or the witch, out there, dealing with all those big demons  and dangerous townspeople. Let me out again when you’ve got things straightened out.”

And so the demon stayed in his cage forever, happy to be safe. Every few years, even after the witch and priest had died, the townspeople would dress up and pretend to be evil, and someone would bring out the demon in his cage so he could see that it was still too dangerous to come out. And the demon never discovered how he had been tricked, and the practice of frightening evil things with pretend evil things continued to this very day.

So next time you walk safely past a well without being pushed in, remember Halloween and the clever and kind people who inspired it.

A Purse Dream

There once was a thief who was extremely bad at thieving. Thus, he was extremely relieved when, on a dreary Thursday in March, he found a extremely unattended purse left on the bench at a bus-stop. It was your typical ugly handbag, stitched from so many colors that an observer could not recall any colors it wasn't.

"Stop!" cried a woman’s voice. The thief, who now had the purse in his lap and was in the process of finding his way into it, stood to escape."Don't do it!" cried the voice again. He spotted a woman some way down the road, standing and waving her arms as if flagging down an airplane. She was so short and so slight that she could almost be mistaken for a child. He turned to run, confident that he could outrun someone of her stature.

Suddenly something slammed into him with almost enough force to knock him down. He stumbled and found the same woman clinging to him, trying various grips and holds to encourage his body to the ground. He marveled, momentarily, at the speed with which she had covered the distance. He swung around and threw her off. She was fast but not strong. She landed on the sidewalk, and he dashed across the street, ignoring the traffic that honked at him.

He slid into an alley, dived through an open door into the empty back room of a small shop, and crouched in the shadows.  A moment later, he heard impossibly rapid footsteps approach, pass, and fade away just as quickly.

He sighed and slid down to sit in the comforting refuse of the abandoned room. He examined the purse at his leisure. It was just as ugly now as before, and he found that the reason he could not open it earlier was a lock holding the clasp together. He smashed this using a heavy piece of metal he found on the trash-strewn floor.

When he opened the purse, a hand reached out.

Screaming at an octave he had not known he could achieve, he dropped the purse. The hand felt the floor, as if it were merely someone reaching through a doorway instead of a disembodied hand flailing about on the ground. Then a head followed it out of the purse, which was attached to a chest, which was attached to another arm, some legs, and some feet.

A tiny man now stood up beside the purse, picking his teeth as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He wore simple robes and a tiny hat all of the same wide variety of colors as the purse. He examined his surroundings, the room, the door to the alley, and the thief standing slack-jawed in the corner. He lifted up the purse and shoved his head back into it. “It’s safe to come out everyone. We’ve been freed!” Cheers resonated from within the purse, loud enough to belong to at least three dozen people.

And sure enough, one by one, more tiny people scrambled and scratched their way through the purse’s opening and marched out of the room. The thief counted fifty, and then he gave up counting. They were all dressed the same, with the little hats and strangely colored clothing.

Once the flow coming out of the purse finally ceased, the first tiny man picked up the purse and marched up to the thief. “Thanks, pal.” He slapped the purse into the thief’s hands.

“What are you?” marveled the thief.

“Memories, buddy. We are all of her memories.” He bowed and left.

The thief threw the purse into a dumpster and ran home. He went back to school and then became a much better banker than he ever was a thief. One day, an extremely quick woman snatched his briefcase and escaped, but she found nothing inside but papers and a sandwich.

A Bedtime Story About Murder (part two)

"I met her in a construction site."
"Very romantic."
"And you would know?"
"I know lots about romantic!"
"Sure you do. Young people always think they know what romance is. I met her in the site because she was the contractor making a building for my boss.”
"What kind of building?"
"Uh... you know, I can't remember."
"You're not a good liar, Grandpa!"
"There never was a good liar in this whole world."
"I caught you fibbing, so tell me what kind of building."
"Ah. I think I remember now. It was casino."
"What's that?"
"Do you want me to tell the story, or do you want me to tell you what a casino is?"
"Hm..."
"She was exquisite in her hard hat and jeans. Commanding. Powerful. Dangerous. And she had these... ah well, she was very beautiful let's just say that shall we?"
"And then you loved each other. Yada yada yada."
"Yes. It didn't start as love, but it bloomed in time. But that was all the time we got. Within the year, she was dead."
"Dead? But why? Did you kill her?"
"In a way. It was my fault she died. You see, my boss liked me a lot, so he was going to give me a very important job in the business. But this guy I worked with, Vinny, he thought the job was owed to him."
"So he killed her?"
"So he poisoned my food. And by chance, she ate it before I did. She died in my arms."
"Wow. That's so sad!"
"Yes. I know."
"But it wasn't really your fault grandpa. You loved her. You didn't mean for her to die."
"That's true.”
"You didn't kill her, that Vinny guy did."
"Also true."
"So!”
"So what?"
"So this was the story of how YOU killed someone. But her dying wasn't you fault!"
"Oh, I see you are confused. No, she's not the one I killed. She's not the one I was referring to anyway."
"Then who was it?"
"Well, the next week, I cut the break lines of Vinny's sports car. He drove through a red light and got plastered across the side of a semi truck."
"Wow!"
"And that, dear child, is why you should always wear your seat-belt."
"That was a great story Grandpa. Tell me another!"
"No no, the story is over, and it's time for sleep."
"I'm not tired! Have you ever killed anyone else?"
"Lay down like a good girl."
"Okay, how about love! Have you ever loved anyone else? It's okay; you can start with 'once upon a time!' What about casinos? Tell me... or I'll cut your break line!"
"Goodnight, child."
"Nuts."