I should really catch up on my recorded shows, but I’m a skimmer.\u00a0 I took a few screenwriting courses in college which actually spoilt much of my enjoyment of TV and movies for a while as I carefully analyzed them for where the punch would hit.\u00a0 I had my viewing of 45 minute shows down to between seventeen and twenty-three minutes depending on how much I liked the dialogue writers.\u00a0 I don’t quite always get the “websurfing” metaphor when it was much more what I did on the couch (futon, yes) that was like riding the crest of a wave before crashing down into what always seemed to me to be a suspicious quagmire of commercials.<\/p>\n
(You also get those on the radio – you hit your first button, commercial… then you hit all the rest just to find out that except for the last stanza of “Sweet Home Alabama,” which you’re really beginning to hate as a song for its being overplayed there’s no music on, just one of those points where everyone’s playing an ad.\u00a0 Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t wield the big guns – I think that if I had control over the forces of the universe I might just change that.\u00a0 Of course, it probably represents a deal between some forces or powers – “I’ll give needy children the power of love, but when you get a commercial on x<\/strong>, every other decent station will be running a commercial, too.”\u00a0 Where x<\/strong> is your station of choice.\u00a0 And this is not just an FM thing – it goes into the AM spectrum, too.\u00a0 I just have to avoid tuning in in the middle of the day on my talk radio for fear of running into some stinky cheese show hosts.)<\/p>\n I was sliding between plot points and avoiding the Disney channel when I looked up at Doloise, who was busy poking at the one plant I have in my apartment, a very neglected Chlorophytum comosum<\/em>.\u00a0 (Random trivia here – did you know that two of the easiest plants to keep are the Dragon tree bamboo and the Aspidistra elatior, or Cast Iron plant.\u00a0 If they had something called “Warlock’s Tongue” I’d just be inviting spirits of irony, right?)\u00a0 The spider plant trailed a baby around the pot – it was a cute little ceramic toad with a wide-open mouth that I think Maggie potted.\u00a0 It was a gift “for luck” from a lady who had a mild case of the gnomes.<\/p>\n “Are you…talking to it?” I asked.<\/p>\n I deserved the look I got.<\/p>\n “If it should happen to hold wisdom that makes my task easier to bear, I shall inquire of it.\u00a0 What will you do with the dark marked sorceror?”<\/p>\n For a moment I wondered if she had read my Harry Potter books, but then I realized she was being literal-minded again, and I focused back on Ivan.\u00a0 There was a connection I couldn’t see, but I could feel it.\u00a0 It was frustrating, like walking an invisible tightrope might be if you were, say, the type of person to walk tightropes and found one become invisible.\u00a0\u00a0 The metaphor was stretched, yes.\u00a0 Suffice it to say, I suspected it to be fine if the tightrope that became invisible was one you were used to and didn’t otherwise change in any fashion, but it would still be disconcerting.\u00a0 I didn’t know how much tightrope walkers could ‘feel ahead,’ and Doloise was in my computer chair so I’d have to look it up later.<\/p>\n Regardless, I was frustrated.\u00a0 So I broke it back into some simple steps.\u00a0 Ivan had wanted to speak to the dead.\u00a0 This would not likely be a matter of mere curiosity, but of a burning need to talk to someone or something that had died.\u00a0 He was willing to give up a great deal of his life energy for this purpose, and now the dead have a conduit to him. Fair’s fair, a bargain’s a bargain, but his fellow sorcerors, including his wife, are concerned.<\/p>\n Let’s step back again.\u00a0 Why do I call them sorcerors rather than wizards?\u00a0 Because theirs is a magic of ritual, taught into families, and not very prone to improvisation.\u00a0 They make deals with ethereal beings.\u00a0 That’s why the half-a-day prep to destroy a city.\u00a0 So they may have made ritual with each other in some fashion, meaning, does Ivan’s bargain affect them all?\u00a0 I’ll consider the premise, but I won’t bank on it.<\/p>\n Feeling the dead in her husband, Nellie wants him back whole.\u00a0 I don’t know if I can do that – once having experience what he had, Ivan will be changed.\u00a0 That’s the nature of touching things on the outside.\u00a0 It’s why I can’t have a normal girlfriend or nice things.\u00a0 Well, I can blame it on Doloise right now, but there’s a like-calls-to-like in here.<\/p>\n Is Nellie jealous of whoever it is Ivan felt he had to speak with so badly?\u00a0 Could it be an ex-girlfriend?\u00a0 A mentor?\u00a0 A lost child?\u00a0 Find that out, and use that as my anchor to the power it holds over him.<\/p>\n I went back into the room and grabbed the card.\u00a0 There was nothing on TV, and Doloise was going to bend the spines on my graphic novels if I left her to them.\u00a0 It was an easy call to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t quite always get the “websurfing” metaphor when it was much more what I did on the couch (futon, yes) that was like riding the crest of a wave before crashing down into what always seemed to me to be a suspicious quagmire of commercials. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-three"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}