One Star War after Another

A short story I published in 2018 was prescient in ways I never intended it to be.

The story is “Sex Cantaloupes from OS (Outer Space),” and it was published in two parts at surely magazine. Those parts are here and here, if you’re interested.

It’s about an invasion from another planet. Metal space ships land outside major cities all over the world, and they expel from their hulls millions of cantaloupes with orifices on them, with which innocent adult people cannot resist fornicating. Men turn their backs on their families, leave their jobs, and abandon society altogether. They devote themselves wholly and utterly to intimacy with these things that may or may not be alive, but which they are drawn to as they have been drawn to nothing and no one else before.

Now, in real life, seven years after that story came out, we’ve got guys who are spending all of their time with chatbots, using them as therapists and romantic partners in lieu of having real romantic partners and mental health professionals.

I just read about one man who has an AI woman living in his Cybertruck. When he’s pilots his glorious racism truck from here to there, she provides him with conversational therapy.

People are cutting real connections with others and forging new connections with things that could never love them, or even be truly interested in what they think or say. It is much like the story that I wrote.

At the end of that story, the cantaloupes all go home, and leave behind the men who love them. They roll back into the ships that they rolled out of. The vessels blast off again, headed who knows where.

What were they here on Earth for? No one knows. But the men are utterly destroyed by this abandonment. Whatever it was that made them so obsessed with the space cantaloupes has left them feeling bereft as nothing else ever could. They have been betrayed.

Lots of them take their own lives, out of shame and an unwillingness to carry on alone. Those with the strength to keep living have to try to put themselves back together and reckon with what they have done, how they alienated everyone in favor of whatever those things were that aren’t there anymore.

Also, I have another story in the latest issue of surely, called “Walking Tom.” It’s about two people, one of whom is named Tom, who go on a walking date. It gets wild!

Also, they’re finally tearing down the White House! You know, the one the president has his office in? That one, yeah. They’re getting rid of some of it. You may have heard about that already.

It’s one of those things, maybe the third one this week, that makes me pause a moment and wonder what exactly is going on.

The White House is a pretty important building. Right? It’s probably in the top three most important buildings in the United States. It could the most important one, in fact.

Now crews have gone in and ripped it apart. Which is what Magneto does, in one of the X-Men films.

The president is doing something that Magneto does, in a movie.

It seems like someone should go to Washington, DC and—I don’t know—stop it from happening? Or maybe some of the people who live there should do something about it. They could drive over there, or take the train. Some of them are close enough to walk. They could yell, at the demolishing people, Hey! Stop destroying the White House!

It’s just—I don’t know. It seems like it might be a bad sign, that the president is destroying the White House.

A couple of weeks ago, Incrediwife and I went to see One Battle after Another. I liked it. I’ve never had so much fun having an art-induced panic attack in my whole life.

It really was good. I wouldn’t mind watching it again sometime. Benicio del Toro is sure to be a strong contender for the short list of guys I think are just the best.

I wrote a review of the film on Letterboxd. I don’t like Letterboxd. Every time I post a review there, I wonder why I’m doing that. Why do I spend my time providing content to a website that doesn’t pay me anything for it?

And yes, I am aware that I am currently writing something I will not get paid for.

I’m doing it for you, and it’s because you are beautiful. Yes, you.

I wrote this on Letterboxd about One Battle after Another:

I can't wait for them to make and release the prequel series about the character played by Benicio del Toro. It will explain things like where the rifle came from, how he met and built trust with those skateboarders, what the daughter's first karate lesson with him was like, and how he got started with his dojo. There are just so many unanswered questions with respect to that character, and it would be criminal to not answer them by way of a five-season prestige TV series that will leave no stone unturned.

I wasn’t being serious when I wrote that. Of course I wasn’t!

But I’m willing to bet there’s an enterprising guy in another city somewhere, who has had the same thoughts and taken them seriously. There’s always a prospector who wants to go mining someplace that he really ought to leave alone.

Is there gold under the White House? Is that why the president is tearing it down?

But this leads me to something that a person said on a different website, Bluesky. I will quote it here in full by way of a screenshot. It’s kind of long:

I found the above Bluesky thread by ellie lockhart to be interesting. But at first I found it distressing.

First off, I don’t want every movie I watch and enjoy to actually, basically, if you really think about it, turn out to be remarkably similar to Star Wars. I remember what it was like when my brother James told me, after he watched No Country for Old Men, that the character Anton Chigurh is basically Darth Vader. At first, I kind of laughed that off.

Then I thought about it for a few more seconds, and thought he might be right. Both Chigurh and Vader are hunting someone, and will kill anyone who gets in their way. By the time you’ve laid eyes on either guy, you’re as good as dead, and the way Chigurh forces locks out of door handles with that slaughterhouse tool is not unlike how Darth Vader uses the force; out of nowhere, impossibly, an object just flies through the air. Chigurh has that weird, deep voice, like Vader does, and his hair is even shaped something like Vader’s helmet is shaped. Put a cape on Chigurh and his silhouette will match Vader’s pretty well.

Maybe you’re not convinced. That’s fine. And if you do see what Jim was talking about, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising that Star Wars, which is one of the most enormous cultural artifacts from the last fifty years, would shine a light so bright that you can see its glimmers in other movies and things.

It’s probably true, too, that it’s not so much that Chigurh is like Darth Vader as much as it’s easy to project Vader onto Chigurh. They’re both villains. A lot of villains have things in common with one another. You could say Chigurh is like Dracula and see similarities there without it necessarily meaning anything.

But I think Jim had a good point. And I think this ellie lockhart has a good point. The villains of Star Wars and One Battle after Another are both affectless creeps who hunt their own children. The heroes of both films have been hiding out and looking after kids as they grow to be teenagers, and now that they’re teenagers they can’t hide anymore, it’s time to run.

But I also think that OBaA is like Star Wars in that it presents us with characters who have what would appear to be pretty rich backstories that never get addressed substantially. There’s a whole world we’re only catching a glimpse of, by way of the film. And those glimpses we get make the world feel so much bigger than it would if we didn’t see them.

I don’t really mind that Boba Fett got his own TV show, even though I didn’t like it very much. It was entertaining enough. But I always felt that to make a show about Boba Fett, and to write and present to the world a fuller explanation of where he comes from and where he’s going, is not the ideal way to handle a character like him. I think it’s better to let the broader world outside the frame of the movie be suggested, and leave it at that.

Where did this guy Boba Fett come from, who shows up in The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader hires bounty hunters? Who knows. He looks awesome, though. Vader seems to know him from somewhere, based on how he addresses him directly. His armor is all scuffed up, so he must have done some wild things in it. Maybe he’s friends with Dexter Jettster

To have such thoughts and leave it at that strikes me as the healthiest reaction to noting the presence of a minor character, who has a backstory but doesn’t reveal what that backstory is. It’s more than enough to know that it’s there, where you can’t see it, but where your brain is free to speculate and run wild.

ellie lockhart’s comparison between the two very different-seeming movies also made me realize that the Star Wars prequels would have been more interesting if Anakin and Obi-Wan had both loved the same woman, like if that was part of, or all of, what caused the rift between them. Anakin gets Obi-Wan’s lover pregnant with twins. Then everything goes to hell, and Obi-Wan has to spend his remaining years looking after Anakin’s son, despite how Luke’s very existence is a constant reminder of what has to be great pain.

Speaking of great pain, I have been posting stuff to LinkedIn. I need a new job. The last real job I had was “Assistant Professor,” and that was almost ten years ago. I have been working ever since, but I haven’t been full-time.

I have had my reasons, for not being full-time. I had to be there if the kids needed me for something. Now they don’t really need me for anything. And while I will continue writing, I don’t think there’s a point in spending much time on it. It’s time to pack it in, folks, at least mostly. Not completely.

Fortunately for me, it’s a really good time to be looking for work. Everyone is talking about how great the economy looks, and how there’s really nothing to worry about at all.

I’m trying to figure out how to do what you’re supposed to do on LinkedIn, which is to be sincere and earnest—while also doing it my own way. How do I get people who look at my resume, and then go to my LinkedIn page, to like me, and want to work with me?

Should I talk on LinkedIn about all the things that I would do with Dexter Jettster if he came to my house and had a few hours to kill between shifts at his outer space diner? Should I go into detail about how I’d offer to wash his clothes, and if he said no I would offer again, a little bit later, to see if he changed his mind? His shirt is filthy. Should I continue with my seven-part saga on LinkedIn in which I explain in great detail why I’m afraid of ducks?