Stay still!

Truth/Fiction

Quite often, the line is about the width of that slash. Successful authors walk the line well. Timeless ones blur it. While a well-spun tale always regales, it's when the story makes you sort of go, "Hey! That's me!" that the enchantment is complete.

Well, for me, anyhow.

The preferred Goat-read is comic fantasy. Pratchett, Aspirin, Anthony and such. Not terribly useful stuff and a fair bit more divided from daily life. But even with trolls, goblins and the undead involved, chords still can be struck, and well.

Not-so-famous English writer Tom Holt does not make for smooth reading. "Ok, so Siegfried kills the dragon, gets the Tarnhelm and the ring of power and loses it to a Frost giant through a terribly complicated process of incest and deception. Four thousand years later, the hero of the story runs over a badger who turns out to be the Frost giant in hiding and then there's Rhinedaughters involved and..."

Well, I'm deliberately mucking it up a bit, but one does get lost in his twists.

In the Portable Door trilogy though, he phrased something really well. The protagonist, Paul Carpenter, is luckless, loveless and has been so all through his twenty-odd years.

...leave off. I won't deny that holds true for most of mine, but that's not the bit I'm talking about, alright?

Paul is unremarkably unremarkable. Not good at very much at all, broke and reticent in company (look, sod off. I'm getting to it alright?). Practically invisible to women. To top it off, he has a most distressing syndrome of falling in love.

It didn't take very much - they just had to be there. Tall, short, fat, slim...anything female with a pulse. Or not. Pulse negotiable. And he knew very well about it - he just couldn't do anything about it. Upon the third meeting or so, his pulse would race and he'd find himself stealing glances...well, robbing them, really. He fell in love with anything that'd stay still long enough.

That last was the quote, yes. Don't like them tadpole things at the tops of sentences that aren't dialogue. Tadpoles have their place. Ponds.

So it was that something I'd never been about to put a finger on was dragged screaming and kicking into the spotlight. I had that syndrome! Have, even.

Through the teenage diaries, I fixated myself on all sorts of women. Some of them didn't even resemble women. I'd go as far as to say human beings, but that would be going a little far. Though there was that one with the mustache...

Nevermind. Suppressed memory in time. So, yes. Explained all sorts of things, it did. My movie melancholia, for one. Yes, it just takes roughly an hour and a half of watching a character for it to sink in. Heck, for a bit I was even enamoured with Narusegawa. Naru of Love Hina fame. It's an anime. I did feel silly about that one. And that other one I went outstandingly psychotic on from reading her writing. If I weren't me, I'd scare me. Lots.

It's tough being an introverted nerd-geek that way. I'm hiding it better these days, but tennish years of cultivated instinct are hard to break completely. And I suspect all of us, besides the elite order of coke-bottle specced', acne-at-forty-five computer programmers are prone to it. Those blokes are just hardcore. Born to press Allllllt.

Sorry, best pun I could do on short notice.

So if you're female and have a nerd-geek friend, it's quite likely he's smitten with you. Do something about the poor boy. If you're not going to take him up on his uh, silent offer, do something to put him off. Nothing vicious, mind. We nerd-geeks are fragile that way. Many a broken-hearted sysadmin has been found dead in the morning, having hung himself with his mouse cord.

...I admit I'm at a loss for ideas, here. He's going to think everything you do is divine. If you squirt cola through your nose at him, he's not going to wash that shirt for the next week. Invite him over for dinner and serve up blackened bits on a plate. Watch in fascination as he crunches through what really is charcoal and asks for seconds.

So, sorry. Not much help. Don't worry, it wears off with time. But on no account show any kind of competence with a computer or inclination to play games on one. That rustling in the bushes at 3AM you'll hear for the next ten years will be him.

Quite happy I was, to have it suddenly cleared up for me. Not that it's a whole lot of help when you can't do anything about it. But it's nice to know, and all that.

Though, what Tom Holt didn't cover was what to do when, out of the wild blue, something all music and song and tinkly grace - what dreams may come - decides you somehow qualify.

I'm going with deer-in-headlights. If I figure it out, I'll do a book and retire off it.

No. No, I didn't.

Unless you're one of those charmed bastards, you've had one of these days. You can take five out of seven buses from that bus-stop to where you're going and the other two come twice each before them. A usually innocuous slip dumps that hot coffee on your lap. Just before the huge, fuck-off important meeting.

Nothing goes quite the way it's supposed to. Doing your damnedest, everything that's expected from you is still late.

Hectic, hectic week and a half. Crazed, WTF DID THE TIME GO sort of thing. Still, it was bearable. Almost against my will, an unanticipated...tinkle, flavoured things nicely, much like the sweet-after-medicine deal for little sick kids.

It's distressing to discover, however, that I now seem to be a Responsible Adult. Mr Ancob - the boss - is out of the country. And instead of HURHUR GO LATE LEAVE EARLY, I instead work ever longer hours than the usual crazed ones to keep up. I'm almost disappointed with myself.

Stuff had to get done. And as said, all of me to do it with. I get to the office at three-thirty in the morning after a jug and two bottles, dazed but determined.

Bad combination.

The ingrained routine takes over. Switch everything on, empty pockets onto table. I decide to wash my face before tackling anything. Stifling the 34th yawn, I lurch out of the office.

Something occurred to me just before the door shut behind me. The instant lay between the softer click the metal in-outie bit by the side of the door makes as it contacts the edge before the hole and the louder sound of it springing back into place, extended into the hole.

I freeze. My eyes go from "half-closed with sleep and beer" to "walk in on parents having sex".

Silence.

No. No, I didn't. Did I?

Mouthing the words airlessly, I turn. The fluorescent light glinted maliciously off the doorknob. Rapidly, I replay the past five seconds in my mind.

With doorknobs these days, a push of a tiny button locks the door from the inside with a springy clack. So easy. There's no excuse for forgetting. Must make sure everything is secure. But I tend to be casual about it. Even when alone at the office, how much disaster can happen in a pee-span?

No use. The usually welcome haze of a beer or five left me yet in doubt. I reach with trepidation for the doorknob.

Grip.

Breathe.

Turn.

chikachika.

...

chikachikachika

...

Bloody 'ell.


There I was, outside the office three-forty in the morning, inebriated and nothing else on me besides the clothes on my back. For the first ten minutes, I reminded myself to be calm and rational. Ah, the picture hanging off the door. I take it down and undo the wire it hung by. Follow twenty minutes of poke-prodding, inspired by too many movies that while entertaining, tend to lie about things like how easily locks are picked.

Then I proceed to lose it.

Another twenty minutes later, victory was...the door's. Bruised and battered, I learned new respect for the flimsy-looking shit that is cubicle panelling.

I can't remember ever feeling quite as low as when I flipped the door off in unwilling admission of defeat.

Cue walk to friend's place. A fair distance in normal circumstances became interminable, with a bruised foot. Reach. Scare seven types of it out of said friend. Sleep.


You evil wooden bastard. For now, you are needed. But one day...one day. Ten minutes with an axe, and a night of toasting marshmallows.