David Dubrow

Author

Update 8-28-2020

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When I’m not writing and rewriting, I’m planning and outlining. When I’m doing none of those things, I’m glowering at nothing, willing the words to come. They rarely obey. So, things are more or less normal.

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I’ve talked about author Joseph Hirsch in this space before, with my reviews of his disturbing science fiction novel Touch No One and his crime novel My Tired Shadow. He also contributed to Adam Howe’s anthology Wrestle Maniacs with a sort-of prequel story to My Tired Shadow.  He’s really quite a prolific writer, so don’t take this as an exhaustive listing, and he dabbles in everything from horror to drama to even romance. I envy his skills and output.

A more recent title of his is the sci-fi novella My Uncle’s New Eyes. It’s a taut, slow-burn thriller that keeps you seared to the page, and by the time you’ve read the last word, stick a fork in you: you’re done. A tale of lost memory, bizarre science, and shocking betrayal, it follows troubled teenager Michael when he’s sent to spend time with his uncle Jimmy “Grim Reaper” Reeves, a former boxer living in the desert with a beautiful, mysterious caretaker. Hirsch has a way of getting under your skin, making you feel everything his characters experience, and My Uncle’s New Eyes shows what a supremely skilled writer can do at the top of his game.

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Season 3 of Dark, the German sci-fi show I talked a bit about here, wraps up the series in a way that’s minimally satisfying. SPOILERS FOLLOW. The Schrodinger’s Cat concept introduced in this season didn’t add anything valuable to the mythology, and the Origin Trio were too obviously shoehorned in as last-minute antagonists. Clausen’s subplot went nowhere. Eva cutting Martha’s face was silly and unnecessary. Noah, a child murderer, made a terrible hero. Where everything fell down for me was the end, which reflects the problem with most of today’s science fiction. There was nothing aspirational about it; the only way to fix things was for the characters to annihilate themselves. In a universe without God or an objective moral standard, all you have left is the amoral nihilism of pure science. Also, it was funny that they had to limit Mikkel’s appearance, due to the actor’s having grown ten inches between seasons. Kids.

One show I can wholeheartedly recommend is the Israeli series Shtisel, about a Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) family in Jerusalem. It does a good job of swimming in the dramedy realm, where the laughs are balanced by touching moments. Michael Aloni as Akiva makes you completely forget about his less sympathetic role as Himmler in When Heroes Fly. If I had a complaint, it’s that the show occasionally meanders in a less focused way, but with so many characters, it can’t be helped.

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I’ve also done some writing for Romans One.

In this piece, I discussed despair:

Despair is where the Adversary lives. God, who is all good all the time, has a specific plan for you, and when you embrace despair, you deny God’s presence in your life. Despair represents the loss of faith, the false notion that you’re not equal to God’s plan for you. Obviously when something truly terrible happens like the loss of a spouse, parent, or child, despair is an easy pit to fall into. In the aftermath of a horrible assault, despair can seem like the only option. Despair is soul-crushing, and when you’ve truly experienced it, you remember that feeling for the rest of your life.

I also addressed the bromide of tolerance, arguing for less of it:

Too often, though, the reality is many college kids, fattened on a diet of Captain Planet as children, Howard Zinn as a teen, and Cornel West as a legal adult, are now working on a new college degree: screaming obscenities into a black cop’s face during a race riot. They think that’ll look good on a resume, and, sadly, in some quarters it just might.

Rather than pushing back early on, parents let it go. Rather than deciding enough was enough at the very beginning, they find themselves here.

And I offered the heretical notion that politics won’t save us:

If you want to change what’s going on instead of merely watching it, you have to focus on culture: art, media, education. This means doing more work on top of your 9 to 5. If you don’t like statue toppling, church defacing, and drugstore looting, you need to run for your local school board and win. You have to become a teacher who refuses to propagandize her students. You have to make movies. You have to write books. You have to paint pictures and put on plays and make music that elevates the values you hold dear.

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I won’t sign off with “Stay safe,” because safety is overrated, and nothing important or good happens without some risk. Instead, I hope that whoever you are and whatever your circumstances, you’re having a great time and are with people you love.

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Joseph Simonet

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This was from the last shoot I did with Joseph

I want to tell you about my friend Joseph.

In all ways, Joseph was a big guy: tall, muscular, enormous personality and generosity. Both a polymath and an autodidact, he was always amazingly well-read. He was possessed of a terrific sense of humor, and could go from more dry, subtle jokes to my kind of fifth-grade bathroom humor at any time. An absolutely enjoyable fellow to spend time with under any circumstances.

Joseph’s business was martial arts and fitness, both of which he did better than anyone else I ever worked with. Always experimenting, always learning, always innovating, he had achieved mastery in a number of martial arts, including Tracy’s Kenpo, Pentjak Silat, Wing Chun Kung Fu, Doce Pares Eskrima, and even Yang style Tai Chi Chuan, among others. Over time he began to bridge the gap between martial arts theory and real-world self-defense, making him a truly formidable instructor-trainer.

He had several higher-profile clients, including former Detroit Lions player Mike Utley, whom he helped with physical rehab after Utley’s paralysis, and former Stone Temple Pilots lead singer Scott Weiland.

I got to work with him on many instructional video projects, and the DVDs still hold pride of place front and center on my video shelf. He was a great man to work with: professional, eager, high-energy, always on.

Earlier I said he was a big guy. He’s now suffering from primary progressive aphasia, which is a type of dementia. It’s a dreadful thing to happen to such a great man. Dementia takes you away from your loved ones before it kills you, and for this to happen to Joseph is awful in a way that’s impossible to describe.

His daughter Carly is asking for your help to defray the cost of his care. Please click the link and give what you can. Or if you can’t afford to, share the link far and wide. Just a few years ago, Joseph had it all: a martial arts school in Wenatchee, Washington; a huge, beautiful property in Chelan; and a wife and family. This illness has taken so much from him, and he deserves comfort.

I wish you could’ve met Joseph when I knew him. I’m lucky to have been his friend.

I’d never ask this for myself, no matter what. Please help my friend Joseph.

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Update: 6-1-2020

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Over the last several weeks of distance learning for my son and dealing with the other effects of the Corona crisis, I’ve found time to read books in the wee small hours.

A notable effort is Alex Berenson’s nonfiction book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. The issue of pot in America is so fraught with misinformation, competing political narratives, and controversy that before Berenson’s book it was impossible to determine fact from fiction about any of it. After Berenson’s book it’s still impossible, but what Berenson does is shine a spotlight on the potential dangers of marijuana, and how we did so little research of any kind before decriminalizing it in major areas of the U.S. There’s a massive difference between cannabinoid oil used for medicinal purposes and the THC in today’s marijuana, and pot lobbyists have exploited ignorance about the one to promote use of the other. We don’t know a great deal about both long- and short-term use of today’s strains of pot, and yet we’ve accepted marijuana as a cure-all for everything from insomnia to nausea to anxiety. Berenson does as well as anyone can to cut through the jargon and misinformation, but there’s so much garbage that his book can only be considered a necessary first step to understanding a subject few people seem to want to get to the bottom of.

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I first discovered Jonathan Carroll’s novels in the house of friends who let me stay with them the first few weeks I moved to Colorado decades ago, and I’ll be eternally grateful to them for both their hospitality and library. At the time I started with Carroll’s Sleeping in Flame, a book about a man who discovers that he comes from a far stranger and yet more familiar place than he realizes, and he has to come to terms with a nightmarish legacy that threatens to turn his entire reality inside-out. Surreal, bizarre, and yet matter-of-fact, it’s the perfect introduction to Carroll’s incredible universe of magical realism. Over the years I acquired every Carroll book I could get my hands on, and enjoyed them all.

But, as it turned out, I’d read some of them out of order, namely the Answered Prayers series.

Answered Prayers follows the lives of people touched by the surreal, all of whom know each other in some way: Walker Easterling, Cullen James, Weber Gregston, and others. Odd names, yes. And, like most of Carroll’s books, at least some of the action takes place in Vienna, Austria. While I don’t think I missed anything by reading them out of order, over the last few weeks I reread the series in order of publication, getting the overarching story in full:

  1. Bones of the Moon
  2. Sleeping in Flame
  3. A Child Across the Sky
  4. Outside the Dog Museum
  5. After Silence
  6. From the Teeth of Angels

After Silence is a bit of an outlier, referencing characters from the other novels but lacking the magical connection that binds them. Outside the Dog Museum is kind of a frustrating read, with the protagonist a difficult person to like and a lot going on without much resolution. From the Teeth of Angels is the most disturbing work of the series, and leaves an unsettling mark on you long after you’re done reading it.

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In addition to reading, I did some writing for Romans One.

This piece talks about going somewhere outside of Hollywood for your entertainment:

You can rail about empty Hollywood tripe produced by hateful narcissists every single day, but until you make the difficult and necessary choice of not watching it, even the stuff you like, you’re contributing to a horribly corrosive system that will never change on its own. The more time and money you give them, the more sewage they’ll pump out.

And here, I discuss social media:

The use of social media, with its laughing/crying emojis, eye-rolling gifs, and relative anonymity, separates the true self from the internet version in ways that make us all seem awful and unlovable. The consequences of ruining someone’s afternoon over a disagreement are minimal, at best. Pile-ons are encouraged. If your ideological opponent says something patently stupid, it would be wrong not to ratio him. Right? Teach that “dummy” a lesson.

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Reading books and avoiding the social media dopamine circus make me more into the person I want to be, so I’m going to continue to do that. I encourage you to do the same.

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Stewards of the Earth: My Post at Romans One

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My first piece at the Bible-centered site Romans One focuses on one of my favorite subjects: food!

If we’re to rule over the fish and birds and livestock, it’s up to us to determine the character and nature of that rule, aided by the Bible. The earth and all that live upon it belong to God. We’re rulers, we’re governors, we’re stewards, but as God says in Leviticus 25:23, “The land is mine.” So we’re to take good care of the earth because it doesn’t belong to us. This care includes stewardship of both land and beast.

An old joke goes something like this: “There’s plenty of room for all God’s creatures…right next to the mashed potatoes.” We were no longer enjoined to live as vegetarians since the day Noah landed on Mount Ararat. Which is good, because animals from chickens to pigs to cows are really quite tasty, and they provide us with nutrients that can be otherwise difficult to acquire.

Currently, the way we produce the majority of livestock is through CAFO farms. CAFO stands for Controlled Animal Feeding Operation, and it’s as awful as it sounds. In a CAFO, animals are confined to tiny cages for much of their short, miserable lives and fed substances to artificially increase desirable qualities that have nothing to do with nutrition. They’re pumped full of antibiotics to keep them from dying of illnesses contracted through standing all day in their own waste and mutilated to prevent them from injuring themselves. Chickens, for example, will occasionally tear out their own feathers when under stress, so the CAFO solution is to de-beak them.

Read the entire piece! You’ll dig it, I swear.

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Deeper Glimpses into the Corona Universe

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The Coronavirus death toll has risen of late, but the number of Corona cases has dropped. Because we’ve been relying on models that have been wrong from the very beginning, and nobody seems to have a decent grasp on the data, it’s difficult to determine how much of this is an improvement. The talking heads in our news media, those who don’t have an interest in maintaining a sense of panic, have suggested that we’re turning the corner or flattening the curve: choose the cliché that best comforts.

If the improvement is to be believed, then we should consider next steps: examining our reaction to the crisis and doing what’s necessary to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Many of us are already demanding accountability, whether that comes from impeaching the Bad Orange Man again, demanding reparations from Xi Jinpooh, or some combination of that. We don’t live in a world of accountability anymore, if we ever did. People fail up, not down. Not only that, but demands for accountability are, for the most part, misplaced in their targets. I know who I’d want to hold accountable, and it’s most likely not who you’d want to pay for the loss of lives and livelihood. The people hollering for accountability also generally tend to demand closure in personal relationships, which is a virtual impossibility. Closure, the way it’s wished for, is a gift as rare as the Hope Diamond. It never happens the way you want it. The only people who can offer closure are fiction writers, and that’s their job: to give you the make-believe justice you don’t get in the real world. A world that offers closure is a world that doesn’t need stories. No accountability, no closure. Deal with it.

So the best we can do is hunker down, protect our own, and prepare for the next dose of abject stupidity from our political, cultural, and intellectual leaders.

What’s odd about this situation is how convenient it is, from a broader political/cultural standpoint. We’re told that the best thing we could do during this major worldwide crisis is literally stay at home. Don’t interact with others outside of the gigantic poisonous cauldron that is social media. Don’t go to church or synagogue. Just sit there and suckle the glass teat until you’re told it’s safe to go out again. It’s the Slacktivist Cataclysm, where social media and television-addicted shut-ins are saving the world by doing what they do every day: holing up and ordering delivery. Previous generations went without sugar and meat, they planted victory gardens for food to support the war effort. Today, we hoard toilet paper and glue our eyes to Netflix to support the War on COVID-19. And if you question the wisdom of shutting down the world economy to combat Coronavirus, you find yourself trapped in Manichean stupidity: Don’t die for Wall Street. Stay inside or you’re killing grandpa. Don’t you care?

I’ve noticed a creeping escalation in my locale, where requiring social distance through force of law is no longer good enough. First they told us not to gather in large groups. Then they shut down non-essential businesses (I’d argue that if your business remaining open means the difference between personal ruin and personal survival, it’s pretty damned essential). Now they’re shutting down entire public areas to make sure you diseased proles stay socially distanced.

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CLOSED. No swings for you. People could die, you know. And it’d be your fault.

Also CLOSED. For your own good. 

Not only is this playground CLOSED, but the powers that be took the extraordinary step of removing the basketball hoops and backboards from the posts because HORSE kills. 

This is the world we live in: misery and isolation, with neighborhood oligarchs hoarding toilet paper. CHOOSE SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Next week I might have something different, something non-COVID-related, but who knows? It’s the only story anywhere. The information we get is different every day, the massaged data is sketchy at best, and virus mitigation techniques have already devolved into stupid TSA-style security theater. Just keep your mouth shut and stay inside.

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What the Future’s Going to Look Like

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A few days ago President Trump extended the Coronavirus social distancing guidelines to include the entire month of April, which was unwelcome news for everyone save our political/media class of Twitter-addicted shut-ins. A major concern is not just when things will return to normal, but what normal will look like on the other side of this crisis. “We can’t return to business as usual,” the talking heads tell us.

Okay, but what does that mean? I’d like to think that we’ll make significant changes to our geopolitics, but there’s no guarantee that our leaders will do that. No doubt it will be impossible to get a consensus on what those changes should look like, no matter how many people die from COVID-19. Like so much, what happens next is going to be a waiting game while we importune the people we voted for to do what we voted them to do.

For my part, I’m still writing the science fiction adventure series I started last year. (Well, I’m trying to write it with everyone at home.) A theme in this new series is, somewhat unfortunately, a kind of contagion. I’m some time from finishing it, but in light of recent events, I don’t know how the story will be received. I know that there are likely many writers right now developing Coronavirus fiction of all kinds. We’ll see how that works out for them.

Disease was also a theme in my Armageddon trilogy. In the first book, The Blessed Man and the Witch, I introduced the secret war of Heaven versus Hell, with innocent people used as proxies to fight for the holy artifacts that would make a difference in the last battle. The second book, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, showed the characters attempting to stop Hell from gaining an insurmountable advantage, and how a third faction planned to change the nature of the conflict. Finally, in The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, demons swarm across an Earth in which the angels are terribly outnumbered.

Hell’s victory plan involved the corruption of souls with horror and self-loathing; one way they did that was by releasing a virulent, incurable strain of leprosy. The American government’s response was to set up temporary hospitals (leper colonies) to quarantine the infected. Several characters wound up contracting the disease, which, while not immediately fatal, was nevertheless debilitating and disfiguring. Many sufferers attempted to conceal the symptoms by wearing gloves and/or surgical masks. In the following excerpt from The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, Ozzie has recently joined up with Aidan, a teenage leprosy patient who fled a burning hospital in a stolen ambulance with Mrs. Cai; Lem, a bar owner now driving the ambulance; and Patty, a regular at Lem’s bar.

—

Ozzie glanced over his shoulder and found himself eyeball-fucking the weird, mute Mrs. Cai, who stared back and said nothing. Patty hadn’t moved. Aidan happened to look in his direction, and seeing him said, “Ozzie? Can I ask you something?”

Mierda. The kid hadn’t shut up for more than five minutes since they started this trip, and now Ozzie had broken the welcome silence by looking at him.

“What,” Ozzie said.

Aidan swallowed. “Uh…we’re all gonna have to fight, right? Fight the…the demons. Once we find the five angels.”

Ozzie didn’t reply.

“It’s just that…it’s not that I’m too scared to. You know, to fight. I mean, I am scared, but…well…I can’t see real well. I was gonna get cataract surgery next week, but…” Aidan lifted his gauze-wrapped hands. “And…the nerves in my fingers are shot. The ones I got left. I can’t feel anything.”

Leaning back, Lem glanced sidelong at Ozzie.

“We ain’t gonna leave you on the side of the road just ‘cause you’re sick, manito,” Ozzie said. “Just do what you can and stay out the way.”

“Can the angels cure us? You know, me and Mrs. Cai. People got cured in the Bible all the time.”

Ozzie shook his head. “No lo sé. Maybe.” He turned back around.

Squeezing the steering wheel hard enough to make his yellow rubber gloves squeak, Lem murmured, “I got it, too. The leprosy.”

“Sí. I know.”

Lem didn’t look at him. “I ain’t took these gloves off in five days. Afraid to see what my hands look like now.”

“Sí. Deal. We all got problems.”

Scowling, Lem shook his head and said, “We need gas.”

“Can we make it? We’re almost at the Lincoln Tunnel.”

“This thing drinks more gas than a Caddy. You want it to shit the bed in the Tunnel? What if we got to chase the angels around like we did in Philly?”

—

Take care, and stay healthy.

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