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K-PAX

November 14, 2011 - 11pm

I just finished reading K-PAX. It was one of the most insipid, pathetically bad books I’ve ever read. It was so bad, in fact, that I immediately threw it in the trash the moment I finished it. My only regret (besides that I read it at all) was that I made the shot from across the room and didn’t have the opportunity to throw it away twice.

Here’s the plot: A guy shows up in a mental institution, claiming to be from another planet.  Another guy treats him. Guy A says he’s going to go back to his planet.  Then he does.  This takes more than two hundred pages.  There’s an attempt at ambiguity as to whether Guy A is crazy or not, but it’s done with the sort of delicacy and subtlety most closely associated with professional wrestling.

Where to start?  The “characters?”  Cereal box mascots have more believable motivations and are more interesting.  The main character, in a pathetic example of wish fulfillment for the author, is named Gene Brewer.  Oh, didn’t I mention that the book was written by Gene Brewer?  He couldn’t even be bothered to change the name of his Mary Sue.  It’s possible that he was going for some sort of verisimilitude, and gave his protagonist his own name to pretend the work of fiction was the real-life case study of a patient… but I hesitate to give him that much credit.

Each character is introduced solely for the sake of having a different type of mental problem, being an example of how Guy B is a father, how Guy B is married, or how Guy B is a doctor.  These characters are as one dimensional as masturbation fantasies.  Take Ernie, the only supporting character whose name I can remember: he has OCD, or possibly intrusive thoughts.  That’s it.  That is Ernie’s character.  He has no personality outside of that one trait.   This is exacerbated by the fact that almost no one but Guys A and B speak for the duration of the book.  There is almost no dialog, just the near-continuous, dry-as-toast narration of Guy B.

There’s also the SUDDEN and unnecessary CAPITALIZATION of words, or lack thereof.  In an attempt to be e. e. cummings, Brewer decided that the names of planets should be entirely capitalized and proper names shouldn’t be.  The result of this unnecessary affectation is to make an already unpleasant book OCCASIONALLY SHOUT for no reason and make it more difficult to parse who is talking.  I’ve been reading for a little while now (picked it up a few weeks ago), and I’ve become used to the convention that when I see a capitalized word, it designates something like a person, or a country, or that the writer passed the first grade.  How this chunk of idiocy got past an editor is beyond me.  How it was published, then made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey (who was fresh off an Oscar win!) is baffling.

Brewer seems to have picked up a psychology 101 textbook, flipped to the glossary, picked out a big word he thought we wouldn’t know, and then threw it in whenever he needed to science it up a bit.  The result is insulting to the intelligence of the reader.  Sybil-style multiple personalities abound, every psychopath is of the serial killer variety, and every diagnosis is as simple as Brewer himself.  Treatments consist of cats, stage hypnosis, or simply letting patients minister to each other.  I’m not kidding.

At the end of the book, Guy A goes back to his home planet, leaving behind the catatonic zombie that he had been inhabiting.  Immediately afterward, there is an Animal House-esque epilogue where we find out that everything worked out great for everyone, forever.  I had been hoping that everyone would die horribly, but I guess we can’t have everything.

Yes, I ruined the ending for you.  Yes, you’re welcome.  If I hadn’t, you might have been tempted to read for yourself to see just how bad it really was, and then you would have had to kill me.  I did this for both of us.  You’ll thank me someday.

I’m rarely in support of burning books, but sometimes you just have to admit that Hitler was right.

So, I have this hat…

August 27, 2011 - 7pm

I’ve been going to a chiropractor since March, since I had been more or less constantly in pain from my hip and knee being wildly out of alignment. The pain was frequently bad enough that it caused a noticeable limp and prevented me from walking to work.

My chiropractor examined me, crunched a few bones, and told me that my problem was one that needed correction through treatment.  He started me on twice-weekly visits.  My pain has been significantly better, and I’ve been progressing along nicely.  About a month into treatment, after he was done crunching my bones, he introduced a chunk of foam I’m supposed to lie on for a few minutes at night in order to correct my head-forward posture.

You know the one–the hunched, hands-at-a-keyboard gnome-like posture of the inveterate computer junkie, e.g., me.

I said ok to this, since everything so far has been beneficial.  Lie on it for a few minutes each night, and it will help.  So I did.  Most nights I forget to do it, but my neck posture was steadily improving anyway.  My pain was getting better.

Next, he decides that it’s time for head weights.  This consists of a hat with seven pounds of metal in it, or as I call it, “The stupidest hat anyone has ever worn.”  It’s like a crown for the king of jackasses.  Have a look at it.

So I’m supposed to wear this thing for five to ten minutes a day.  But, here’s the catch… I can’t just wear it.  Since the natural reaction to having a massive, stupid hat on your head is to slowly slump forward, I have to be constantly moving to counteract my body’s natural anti-idiocy reflex.  The result is that for five to ten minutes a day, I parade around my apartment with this damn thing on my head.  Or worse, stand in front of the TV with a controller in my hands, playing video games,  marching in place.

Sometimes I think my chiropractor is just fucking with me.  In a few months he’ll say, “You were actually doing thati?!  Holy shit!”  At this point, he will call in the receptionist and point at me.

“He was actually wearing the hat!”

“No way.”  She’ll say.  Then, to me: “Really?  You thought that was real?  No one thinks that’s real!”

I will nod glumly and look for the nearest exit.  As I try to leave, they will grab me, and the receptionist will put the hat back on my head.  My chiropractor will pose next to me with a double thumbs up and giant grin, and a photo will be taken.   The photo will be sent to Chiropractor Monthly, where I will be captioned “Victim of the month.”

Recommendation

August 22, 2011 - 8pm

We’ve had an intern working in our department for the summer, and he’s leaving on Wednesday.  He’s been connecting with everyone on LinkedIn, and asked me for a recommendation.

I gave him one.  I don’t understand why he wouldn’t use it.

Alex is literally the laziest, most incompetent jackass I’ve ever had the misfortune of working with. Every request was greeted with a grunt of annoyance or outright hostility.

Most days, a “work” day for him consisted of sitting outside the ladies room with his ear to the door until he was chased away by security. Then, five or six hours with a phone sex line on speaker phone, followed by draining a bottle of cheap vodka at his desk.

Multiple attempts were made to fire him. These were stymied by his insistence that he is a “proud black woman” and that racism and “the man” were keeping him down. Apparently these complaints have to be investigated, no matter how spurious.

And he is lousy in bed.

 

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