Podcast
November 25, 2013
In a recent podcast, Anneque Malchien reviewed the anthology “Tuned to a Dead Channel” and had some very nice things to say about my story. She also regularly reviews indie books on her website. Check out the podcast here: http://www.buzzsprout.com/17574/132140-indie-and-more-book-review-episode-2
My essay on “Footloose” is in The Rumpus
October 24, 2013
The Rumpus is a wonderful website that publishes smart pop-culture writing. Recently, they accepted my essay, “Everybody Cut Loose,” about how the strange correlations between my life and the movie “Footloose.” I hope you like it.
Hills like Golden Arches
October 23, 2013
Hills like Golden Arches
by Dale Bridges
(Published in Monkey Puzzle Magazine and nominated for a Pushcart Prize)
In the parking lot outside the clinic, Jane, flushed, red-eyed, looking a bit like Courtney Love on a bender, tells me she wants to go to the pet store.
“I want a cat,” she says.
“What? Now?” I try to sound surprised, though I am not.
“You owe me,” Jane points out, her Giorgio Armani mascara starting to slide down her pale cheeks, her nose ring twitching.
“Are you sure you want a cat? How about one of those super-cool iguanas? They’re very retro right now.”
“What’s wrong with a cat?”
“Nothing, babe. There’s nothing wrong with cats, per se. It’s just that we’re not cat people.”
She arches one of her pierced eyebrows and gives me her famous pseudo-incredulous glare. “And why is that, Danny? Please explain why we are not the type of people who would own a feline. Bestow your infinite cat-people wisdom upon me.”
“I don’t know, babe. Have you seen the type of people who have cats? They’re just not very cool. Trust me, babe, cats are not in right now. Cockatoos? Yes. Albino snakes? Definitely. Small, ugly dogs that you keep in your purse? Of course. But cats? I don’t think so. That means we have to wear sweater vests and purchase refrigerator magnets and rent Meg Ryan movies. It’s all just so…domestic.”
Jane shrugs. “I like Meg Ryan. She’s spunky.”
“That’s hardly the point.”
Jane holds up her hand to demonstrate that this discussion is over and I have lost.
“Does it have to be a cat?” I ask.
Jane nods. “A black one.”
So we go to the pet store. It’s one of those corporate stores that seems like a supermarket, except that all the vegetables are furry and loud. The employees wear red aprons and they have nametags with their pictures on them and they smile too much and they smell tangy. I try to talk some sense into Jane, but she’s sort of freaking out and she won’t listen to reason. She barely even looks at the exotic box turtles, red-bellied tree frogs, South African angelfish, lesbian sand lizards, or Columbian trap door spiders. She stops momentarily in front of a birdcage to watch an endangered parrot with a tuft of red on its chest that looks like a bullet wound. Someone has taught it to sing “Stop! In the Name of Love” by the Supremes. It sounds exactly like Diana Ross.
The dogs and cats are in glass cages, like the kind used to hold Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. Hello, Clarice. When we walk by, the dogs go ape-shit. They’re puppies, all puppies. No one wants to purchase a full-grown dog that’s been screwed up by someone else; you want the chance to screw up your own dog. Anyhow, canine pandemonium. Bark bark barkety bark. I am suddenly very glad we are not getting a dog.
The cats are more mellow. Obviously. They’re cats. There are a lot of kittens but I am surprised to see some adult cats as well. One of them looks like an obese midget dressed in a feline suit. It is lying on its side, panting, its distended belly rising and falling to the exact rhythm of the Phil Collins song playing on the sound system. Jane points at it, rather unkindly it seems.
“I want that one.”
“What? The one that’s the size of Danny DeVito?”
“That one.”
“Can’t we talk this over?”
“That one.”
Guess what––we get that one. We also get a handsome carrying case and a scratching post and a collar with a nametag on it (Whiskers, what a shocker) and a toy that looks like a tiny fishing pole and a ten-pound bucket of kitty litter and a lifetime supply of fish-flavored cat food. All of this goes into the backseat of Jane’s canary-yellow BMW.
“There,” I say. “Now do you feel better?”
And that’s when Jane starts to cry.
Six days ago, while sipping a double mocha latte at Starbucks, after stealing the new My Chemical Romance CD from Virgin Records, Jane told me she was pregnant. I had just smoked a joint and I think I might have taken some Percocet, so I didn’t really understand what she was talking about at first. I made her say it again.
“What do you mean exactly when you say ‘pregnant’?” I said, trying to make eye contact with the girl behind the counter. She looked familiar, kind of like Gwen Steffani but with shorter hair and bigger tits. It was possible I had dated her, or her sister, or purchased Ecstasy from her, or all of the above, at one point in time.
“What do you think I mean?” said Jane. “Through the act of coitus, your sperm penetrated my egg and formed a new genetic organism that shares our combined DNA.”
“Huh?”
Jane rolled her eyes and sighed. “You shoved your wiener in my cunt and we made a baby.”
I bit the end off a biscotti and glanced at the girl behind the counter, who was practically staring at me. “That’s kind of, like, gross, you know.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “There’s like…um…like a little…um…thing inside of you right now?”
“That’s right, Danny. I have a little thing inside me.”
“Wow, that’s pretty intense, babe.”
“Well, it’s going to get even more intense.”
“Right,” I said. I looked at my reflection in the store window, pulled up the collar on my polo shirt, put it back down, fixed my hair. “I see what you mean.”
The new U2 album was playing on the sound system and I remembered that I read an article in Rolling Stone that said Bono was like the neo-Elvis, which meant that Jack White was the neo-John Lennon and Mos Def was the neo-Otis Redding. It was a lot to take in and I just didn’t have the energy to process it. Furthermore, there was a new M. Night Shamalan movie coming out and I had to decide whether I was going to see it in the theater or wait to put it in my Netflix queue. Either way, it promised to be a really suspenseful movie with a disappointing ending. Which was exactly why I wanted to watch it in the first place.
“Well, what do you think?” Jane finally asked.
“About what?”
“About the plight of the Jews in Israel,” she said, then flicked her straw at me. “About me being pregnant, asshole.”
“I don’t think it’s cool to make fun of Israel right now,” I replied. I paused to consider this. “Or the Jews, for that matter.”
“Shut up, Danny.”
“I’m just saying––”
“Shut up, Danny!”
“I’m just saying––”
“I swear to Jennifer Anniston, if you don’t shut your face, I’ll scream.”
I put my hands in the air, cops-and-robbers style. “Okay, babe. Chill.”
“And don’t call me babe.”
“Alright, baby, but chill, okay? I don’t think this is such a big deal. I mean, we can always get it fixed, right? I mean, we’re not…like…like…Republicans. We’re cool. Everything’s copasetic.”
Jane looked away, at the Hot Topic across the street. “I know,” she said. “It’s a minor operation, right? They just let the air in.”
“Air? What air, babe?”
“Hey,” she said, pointing at the McDonald’s behind me, “don’t those hills look like golden arches?”
I turned around. “What hills? What the hell are you talking about?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. I’ll make an appointment for next week.”
That’s when Jane got up and went to the bathroom and the girl behind the counter came over and said she met me on MySpace and then she asked me for my cell phone number and I said that I was between companies at the moment but I told her to check me out on Facebook or Twitter or Blogspot and that I’d text her as soon as possible. But I forgot.
I’m no expert, but it has occurred to me, although there is no way to prove this with absolute certainty, that Jane’s cat is evil incarnate. And pseudo-retarded.
It just lies around the apartment all day, staring at me in a very Mommy Dearest kind of way. Jen says it’s just my imagination, but it’s not. This is not something that I would ever imagine, ever. The only time it moves at all is when I leave the room. If I go to the kitchen, the cat goes to the kitchen. If I go to the bedroom, the cat goes to the bedroom. If I lock myself in the bathroom, the cat waits outside the door until I emerge, and then it continues with the whole staring routine. It’s so monotonous I could scream. It doesn’t make any noise, it doesn’t play––it just watches me. At night, I can feel its stupid eyes looking at me. I can’t sleep. I smoke more pot, take more Valium, but it’s no use.
Jane has also become a major freak. She hasn’t cried once since we were at the pet store. I think she might have, like, post-traumatic stress disorder or something. I read in Entertainment Weekly that Jennifer Lopez had that while she was shooting The Cell. Or maybe it was Vanity Fair. There’s also a chance—but it is very small—that it could have been in People, but I really doubt it, because I don’t read People anymore since they did that interview that trashed Kevin Bacon.
Jane doesn’t smoke pot with me anymore. She takes classes at the community college and reads all these books about psychology and yoga and the art of breathing. She’s learning how to cook Thai food. She’s gardening. She’s listening to Tori Amos. She says she’s going to counsel troubled teens when she graduates. I asked her what was troubling these hypothetical teens, because it seems to me that all the teens I know have it pretty good, aside from the acne and the peer pressure and the kids showing up at school dressed in trench coats and shooting cheerleaders, but Jane just ignored me and continued reading her Oprah book. She doesn’t want to talk about the issues, not really.
I have suggested that we get rid of the cat on several occasions, but Jane says she likes it. I don’t know how this is possible. It doesn’t do anything, it just sits in the corner of the room and stares at me while I try to watch VH1 or read Chomsky or play Street Fighter. I don’t know what it wants. It is a fat, ugly, disgusting black creature that won’t leave me alone. I dream about killing it. Sometimes, when Jane is in class, I pick up a kitchen knife and point it at the cat and scream “Get out of my life!” over and over again. It only stares back at me.
I put the knife away. I take another Valium. I turn on the television.
The Villain
October 23, 2013
The Villain
by Dale Bridges
(Originally published in Transgress Magazine)
It started out as an argument over who was going to be the hero and who was going to be the sidekick. Obviously, we both wanted to be the hero. I mean, we’d read all the comic books, watched all the cartoons, we knew how it worked. The hero got the girl and the sidekick got the shaft. It was a necessary arrangement but in the beginning neither of us wanted to take on Boy Wonder duties. We argued about it a lot, usually over Grand Slams at Denny’s, but there was just no way to prove who was really dominant. Tommy had the telekinetic powers but I had the super strength plus these bad-ass laser eyes that could melt through steel. I argued that I should be the hero because I had two powers and that was twice as many powers as Tommy. But Tommy didn’t see it that way. So when we went out on patrol that first night, the whole hero-vs.-sidekick thing was still kind of up in the air and I think we both wanted to prove that we were hero material and perhaps we got a little over zealous and that’s probably why we ended up chasing after the guy in the dark alley even though he hadn’t really done anything criminal-ish and I caught up to him first because I have the super strength so I could take these huge leaping jumps and I ran him down really easy and tossed him up against a brick wall and that’s when I saw that he was dressed like a homeless man and he probably wasn’t even a bad guy after all. I was about to help him to his feet and apologize for the misunderstanding when Tommy came up behind me and just sort of squashed the guy’s head with his mind. There was blood everywhere mixed with chunks of brain matter and Tommy said it looked like scrambled eggs and ketchup, which it sort of did but he still didn’t need to say it, and then he laughed. I started to cry and vomit at the same time. Tommy told me to stop being such a pussy and to check the guy’s pockets to see if he had any money. He didn’t. Afterward, Tommy told me to pick the guy up and carry him out to the desert and bury him where no one would ever know. So that’s what I did.
And that’s when I realized that I was definitely the sidekick, but Tommy was not going to be the hero.
Texting the Apocalypse
October 23, 2013
Texting the Apocalypse
by Dale Bridges
(Originally published in Transgress Magazine)
hey sara.
hey kelsie.
u hear bout the end of the werld?
yeah. bummer.
i know right?
right.
fire and brimstone.
yeah. brimstone smells like ick.
totaly.
BTW, ricky sutton talked 2 me 2day.
no way.
way.
THE ricky sutton?
yeah.
no way.
way! way! way!
cool. just a sec. my parentz r totly freakin out bout the zombies.
yeah. this apokalips is lame.
tell me bout it. yestrday my bro got fed to The Beast.
the cute bro or the 1 w zits.
cute.
oh. sorry.
its k. i get his room.
score.
i know.
did u see the skirt jenny wore for the genocide?
i know. totaly 2009.
yeah, i was like, That skirt is totaly 2009!
good one.
right?
hey. gotta go. my stupid mom wants me to join a cult with her.
which 1?
the 1 that werships a pole with a photo of tom hanks on it.
cool. the tom hanks pole cult is the best. suzie is a membr.
sweet. see you in hell.
totaly.
Dedication, Skill… and a Bloody Boat Load of Excellent Creativity
September 20, 2013
My short story has been published in an anthology
September 20, 2013
My short story “Welcome to Omni-Mart” has been published in an anthology of dystopian fiction called Tuned to a Dead Channel. It’s being put out by an independent press based in England called Dagda Publishing. There are 14 stories in total, and the price is just $8.99. Right now, you can purchase it at CreateSpace, or you can purchase it at Amazon as a paperback or the Kindle version is $3.99.
While I’m always thankful to be published, I would like to give a specific shout out to Dagda for their charity work. It’s not a big publishing house, but they still give ten percent of their profits to charity, which I find extremely commendable. Therefore, when you buy a copy, you not only support the literary community, you also give to a worthy cause.
No One Cares About “Childfree Adults”
August 29, 2013
About four months ago, I went to the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center, where a soft-spoken doctor with warm hands punctured my scrotal sac with a sharp hermostat and sealed off my vasa deferentia, a procedure commonly known as a vasectomy. Several weeks ago, I took my semen to a local lab and found out that Dr. Warm Hands did her job well; I am now officially unable to procreate. My fiancee accompanied me to both events, and when it was over we celebrated in a manner befitting such an occasion (that’s all the details you get, perverts).
I decided I didn’t want to have children about fifteen years ago. There’s no seminal event that caused this decision; I simply thought about all the things I wanted to do in my lifetime and having kids wasn’t on the list. People sometimes ask why and I used to go through my reasons (over population, financial hardship, diaper changing, etc.) but now I just shrug and let them make assumptions. Because you shouldn’t need a reason to not want children. There are already plenty of them on the planet and many are not being properly cared for. If you don’t want to add another one, people should just say “Good enough” and leave you alone.
I used to get really adamant about the whole thing, acting as if I was being harassed by all the breeders out there, but then I got over myself and just went with the shrug. Honestly, there simply aren’t that many people who care anymore. This isn’t the 1950s. If you don’t want to get married or have a baby, no one passes out from shock. They might ask you a few questions because they’re curious, but is that really such a hardship? Personally, as a part-time narcissist, questions about me are my favorite kind of questions.
And, yes, before you go there, it is different for me because I am a man, but it’s not that different. My fiancee gets more questions and raised eyebrows than I do, but no one’s scrawling “Be Fruitful and Multiply” on her car window in blood. The most annoying reaction she gets is from Baby Boomer women who often tell her, “Oh, you’ll change your mind when you get older,” as if a twenty-seven-year-old woman’s brain is just not developed enough to make such decisions yet.
In the past couple of years, there have been a variety of articles on the subject of not having children, often opinion pieces. I wanted to be supportive of the sentiments expressed by these writers (solidarity amongst childfree adults!) but I just couldn’t relate to their stories, which basically attempted to equate the purposefully childless to repressed minorities. They spoke about vicious rumors spread by their coworkers and accusations of selfishness from their conservative relatives. Maybe this is happening in their world, I can’t say, but it’s not happening to me. When I told my small-town Christian mother about my vasectomy, she said “Oh, my.” Then there was a short pause, followed by, “You should put some frozen peas on it.”
Ironically, these articles about the harassment of the childless have spawned harassing Internet comments and blogs from conservatives who have called couples who choose not to have kids “self-absorbed” and “anti-life.” Perhaps this proves these writers were correct all along in stating there’s a subculture of intense hatred toward people who choose not to procreate, but I don’t think so. It feels more like the usual inflammatory rhetoric spouted by political pundits that gets re-posted over and over on Facebook, making it appear more widespread than it actually is. In the end, the people forcing this conversation don’t seem to realize the rest of us simply don’t care whether they want to have kids or not. It’s none of our business.
Ben Affleck is the new Batman, which brings up this question: Why don’t I want Ben Affleck to be the new Batman?
August 23, 2013
He’s not a terrible actor. And before you start to argue that, yes, he is in fact a terrible actor, go to IMDB and make a list of all the movies he’s in that you legitimately enjoy. Not movies you would write about in a film theory class, just movies you would watch a second time if they happened to be on TV while you were cleaning the house. Go ahead. We’ll wait…
For me there are eleven. I know; I was as surprised as you.
And the films I like are fairly diverse: Good Will Hunting, Chasing Amy, Argo, Shakespeare in Love, Armageddon. That’s not to say Affleck stretches himself much as an actor in any of these movies, but he does move fairly easily from comedy to drama to action. Obviously, he’s no Ed Norton or Johnny Depp, but he’s not Keanu Reeves either.
But part of the reason I like Norton and Depp is that they’re both sort of skinny (except when Norton was in American History X…holy crap) weirdos who seem like the type of people Affleck would beat up during recess in middle school. And that’s sort of the crux of the matter for me.
The movie role that will always define Ben Affleck for me is the spanking-obsessed jock Fred O’Bannion in Dazed and Confused. This also happens to be my favorite movie that Affleck has ever been in. No matter how many asteroids he destroys or awards he wins, this is how I will always see Ben Affleck.
It’s not that he’s too good looking (although that’s part of it). And it’s not that his giant chin always makes him appear smug (although that’s part of it too). It’s that he reminds me of that good looking, smug guy in high school that I always hated because his life seemed so easy. All the girls wanted to be with him and all the guys wanted to be him.
You’d think directing and starring in Argo (a movie nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Director) would alter my opinion of Affleck somewhat. It’s like when that good looking smug guy in high school sits next to you one day in the cafeteria, and you find out he’s actually a really nice guy who wants to be a physics major in college. Theoretically that should make you like him (and maybe it does on the surface) but deep down there’s still a part of you (or maybe it’s just me) that hates the guy even more because now you know that not only is he good looking and popular but he’s also smart and nice. What an asshole!
By almost all accounts, Ben Affleck seems like a really good guy. He gives to charities, he pokes fun at his own stardom, he keeps in touch with people from his old neighborhood. Directors tend to have good things to say about him, as do his family, friends, and coworkers. Kevin Smith practically worships the man, and I really like Kevin Smith.
But none of that makes any difference to me. I want to hate Ben Affleck. I need to hate him. It’s an irrational compulsion that I can’t explain or control. Ben Affleck could win ten Oscars and I’d still think he was an overrated bastard coasting by on his looks. Of course, in the end, this says more about my own shallowness and narcissism than it does about Ben Affleck, but you probably knew that before you started reading this post.
p.s. I do realize that I wrote this entire rant without actually addressing the question in the title, Why don’t I want Ben Affleck to be Batman? The reason for this is that halfway through I realized I have no logical justification for not wanting Affleck to be the caped crusader. I don’t think he’ll be as good as Keaton or Bale, but he’ll probably do just as well as Clooney and better than Kilmer (although I probably won’t admit it if he does).
dale bridges writing 