Jax Book Nook

My short story, “Hostile Work Environment” is now available online through Quagmire Magazine. Read it here: “Hostile Work Environment” By John Willems — Quagmire (quagmiremagazine.com). My thanks to the people of Quagmire Magazine.

Great news! I’ve gotten another short story published at Quagmire Magazine. Hostile Work Environment will be published at Quagmire Literary Magazine – A literary paper where pigs can fly. (quagmiremagazine.com) this Sunday! My thanks to all the editors of Quagmire Magazine.

What’s the story about? If you’ve ever been to a workplace harassment seminar, you know they can be a living hell. My story merely takes that dynamic to its natural absurdity.

Have you ever had a favorite restaurant that made it big, and you regretted it? That pizza place you loved that decided to franchise, but the secret ingredients got lost in translation. The fried chicken place that showed up everywhere, but they couldn’t keep up the quality. You know what gets you? All the people who never knew the original restaurant that thought the knockoff was amazing. You feel sorry for all those people.

I think every preteen boy in the late 90s and early 2000s were like those people who only knew the knockoff, because every preteen boy would come home, park himself in front of the television, and watch Dragon Ball Z. I know because I was one of them. We thought it was amazing. The never ending fights. The storytelling. The long, awkward yelling and so-so animation.

And to think, we were getting the knockoff version. Before Dragon Ball Z, there was the original series we never saw until years later. I didn’t watch the original Dragon Balls until I was an adult in my 30s. The original Dragon Ball was a better show, and I would argue it’s for one reason: power levels.

Power levels were introduced in the first episode of the first season of Dragon Ball Z. An alien named Raditz crash lands on Earth with a device that rates the fighting ability of various fighters. It finds that Goku, our hero, and Piccolo, his old rival, both have power levels in the 300s, while Raditz has a power level 1500. However, Goku’s and Piccolo’s power increases when they concentrate it. Instant tension. As a kid, I thought that was amazing.

This was before I started writing and someone quoted me the phrase “Show don’t, tell.” Yes, we dumb kids felt instant tension, because they told us to. The original series had to show us Goku struggling against the Red Ribbon Army or King Piccolo. This successor show could just have a character read off some numbers to tell us “this is how much more powerful the villain is compared to the hero.” And what that did to the series was just absurd.

It begins with Raditz. with a power level of 1500. The next big baddie is Nappa with a power level of 4000 (I’m getting these from a web site, it may not be completely accurate.) So Nappa must be exactly 2 and 2/3rds as powerful as Raditz. Then comes Vegeta with a power level of 18,000. So Vegeta is 4 and 1/2 as powerful as Nappa. Each fight downgrades the last one.

Then it gets really absurd. Frieza, in his final form (because he has four, you know), has a power level of over one million. So, basically, the fight that Goku and Vegeta had last season was basically nothing you know. Then Cell has a power level of 20 million. And none of these fights really get more impressive than the last when you look at it. Trust us, say the writers, it’s more epic. We just have no visual way to prove that.

Side note. One of the problems with this is that at a relatively low level, Vegeta destroys a planet without really trying. It was a planet with bug people, and after overthrowing the emperor, Vegeta just blows it up witout even having to break a sweat. Frieza does the same at the one million power level by just throwing some energy down into the ground. This begs the question: how the hell do the Z fighters and their nemeses not destroy the planet accidentally, while fighting? No, really, if Vegeta can casually destroy a planet at power level 18,000 by just pointing a laser beam at the planet from afar, doesn’t Goku or even Krillin or Gohan have to worry about blowing up the Earth whenever they shoot a laser beam of moderate power and miss?

But back to the subject at hand, I just find the fights in the original series to be better without the power levels. I don’t need to know that King Piccolo has a power level 200 compared to Goku’s power level of 180. I need you to show me Goku getting his ass handed to him, which in the original series is exactly what they did.

What I really don’t need you to do is tell me that King Piccolo is really kind of a pushover compared to this Raditz guy who is seven times as strong, and then further dilute that by introducing people who are twelve times, 100 times, 500 times as strong, etc. to the point where the comparisons get silly. By the time the show gets to Namek, the world Piccolo was originally from (or that his double was from, it’s complicated), you get the idea King Piccolo actually wasn’t that much stronger than the average Namekian, and even might have been pretty weak. The series never gives a power level to King Piccolo during the show, but given how much more powerful Frieza’s gang must be by pure power level, there’s really no other conclusion you can draw because some Namekians appear to put up a little resistance.

The writers start having to make ridiculous leaps to keep our characters up with these ludicrous numbers. Gohan becomes a Super Saiyan at, what, age 10? Humans practically have no role in the defense of their own planet as even the strongest humans like Tien, Krillin, and Yamcha, have no way to keep up the absurd power levels of the alien and android characters. When Garlic Jr. comes back after the Frieza saga, his minions have received a bump in power levels with literally no explanation as to how they could have increased enough to keep up with the Z Fighters while Garlic is locked away in the Dead Zone. Objectively, the power levels just make Dragon Ball Z absurd.

You might argue that humans flying and throwing power beams at each other was absurd to begin with. Yes, but within its own world, the original Dragon Balls at least made sense. Z, however, has to really stretch things to create internal consistency. All because they decided to add this strange plot device to add momentary tension in the first episode. It would have been better if those stupid little visors never existed.

Last week, we asked the universe, or God, or the people who created Fallout, whatever, why society hadn’t recovered in the two hundred years after the bombs fell. Now, I hope to answer that question: frankly, the pre-war society was just too good.

Wait, you may be saying, wasn’t it like some kind of fascist cult that eventually turned into the Enclave? Yeah, the government was that way, but the economy was apparently pretty bitching. I mean, they could product so much Nuka-Cola, that even with the bottling plants shut down. They still haven’t run out of it two centuries later. Robot butlers and nannies. Medicine where you can heal wounds by just injecting yourself with whatever they put in stimpaks. To say nothing of machines that can perform surgery and get people off drugs.

As I said in earlier posts, the world is getting better, not worse, which generally means technology is getting better at producing goods and services. While they lack the semi-conductor, the Fallout world could be expected to have much higher productive capacity than our world. Then a nuclear war reduces the population to a fraction of what it was. Suddenly, the normal output for one year is enough for the entire country to live off of for centuries.

Indeed, those consumer goods could have been so abundant that there was no need to travel to other parts of the country to obtain anything other than very rare goods. No need to rebuild the roads. Or the factories. Or even the power plants. A few generators can keep the lights on. And it doesn’t take much work to do that.

You might argue that the clothes and foodstuffs would rot pretty quickly. I think people actually did argue that when Fallout 3 occurred. However, that’s assuming that people in 2070 America don’t have access to preservatives and fabrics that are capable of keeping that stuff fresh.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or activity generally, and the people in the Wasteland don’t have to work to get food, medicine, and energy. They just need to rifle through the next building. That’s probably why nothing has been rebuilt. Rebuilding means working and working means having to deal with people, some of whom may not be the most trustworthy.

It’s an allegory for modern society. The system is so good at providing for our basic needs, we don’t need to go to the lengths previous generations did. This doesn’t stop us from working. It stops us from socializing. Why go to the grocery store when you could just have DoorDash deliver? When you don’t leave the house, you stop forming civic groups and start forming chat rooms.

We always imagine the collapse of society to be some kind of nuclear wasteland or zombie filled Hellscape. What if it’s just the collapse of relationships? Maybe we don’t need to blow up half the buildings on the eastern seaboard to destroy society. Maybe we just need to be so good at producing and delivering goods and services that no one needs to go out and meet other people to have their desires fulfilled. We’re getting closer there with AI. How quickly will the day come when a single person can survive without actually talking to another human being? Imagine a future where there is no poverty or war, but we all spend our day talking to Alexa? Maybe that’s what the real apocalypse looks like.

I am now back from my newborn induced hiatus, and I’m picking up right where I left off. On a prior episode of Jax Book Nook, I wrote about Star Trek, which is a television show. I will now write about Fallout, which is a video game. That’s Jax Book Nook everyone. We have movies and video games here. Just like the library now.

Anyway, what I said about Star Trek was that is was better than Star Wars for several reasons, the most pertinent one being that Star Trek understands that the future will be more prosperous than the past and yet still somehow finds a way to add tension to the show by leaning into the idea of chosen suffering: the crew of the Enterprise faces hardships, but only because they have chosen to explore the universe. Most science fiction requires some kind of future disaster to recreate a world of scarcity in order to create conflict.

In that sense, Fallout is not that different from other science fiction. The games take place in an alternate world where the Cold War never ended, or rather, it ends in the year 2077 when nuclear war breaks out between the U.S. and China, wiping out human civilization. The survivors in America take shelter in Vaults which protect them from the destruction, though most of them are being experimented on. The original game takes place in the year 2165, nearly a century after the Great War, and subsequent games take place in the 23rd century, which is ironically also when the original series of Star Trek took place.

Star Trek also had a great disaster, which is referred to alternatively as the Eugenics War or the Third World War. This was caused by the existence of enhanced humans like Khan Noonien Singh, and it also ended in nuclear war. However, by the 23rd Century in that universe, humans are exploring the universe and having copious amounts of sex with aliens as part of an intergalactic federation of planets.

In Fallout? They haven’t even managed to get the corpses out of the street! The roads are littered with people’s bones, and some of those bones look like they’ve actually been there for 200 years! Human beings live in city-states constructed out of junk, as they haven’t even formed central government capable of ruling over states on the East Coast. (Things are a little better out west under the NCR, but they still can’t control roving bands of raiders and regularly get rolled up by LARPers dressed up as Roman Centurions) People still live in buildings from before the war, which are falling apart, as the construction industry appears to be non-existent. Hell, commerce is practically non-existent, with the exception of caravans that trade centuries old goods left over from the old world. Nobody manufactures anything anymore (this time, for real!). Slavery has reemerged. They don’t even have a working road system, not that it matters as very rarely do people own functioning cars! This would be acceptable if we were talking about a world ten, maybe twenty years after the bombs fell, but the Fallout world has had two hundred years to get their act together. What gives?

Now, I know what you are saying. “Jack, it’s not so easy. You have to remember that they have to deal with Super Mutants and Feral Ghouls. Not to mention all the radiation everywhere.” You’re just listing other problems they should have solved by now. First, they can deal with radiation. They have the technology. The plot of Fallout 3 revolves around a device called the GECK which can clean all the water in the D.C. area. There are multiple GECKs, as there was one in Fallout 2 as well. These things can clean up radiation and make soil arable again. Feral Ghouls are basically zombies, and like zombies they can’t use weapons and have no higher brain functions. As predators go, they’re inferior to wolves. As for Super Mutants, yes, they are stronger and immune to radiation, but they’re also dumber than humans and they can’t breed because their genitals have fallen off.

I’m going to circle back to the technology issue: they have way better technology in the Fallout world than we do in ours. Sure, they don’t have semiconductors, but they do have laser weapons, stimpaks, robots, and utopia-creating devices that can make the water in the Potomac potable even after a nuclear bomb was dropped on it. Yes, some of those robots will shoot you on sight, but they can be reprogrammed.

Why haven’t they been able to rebuild yet? I don’t have an answer, so I’ll take some time to think about it. Do any of you have any answers? I’ll get back to you mid-next week.

Please help welcome into this plane of existence, Anthony Luke Willems, my second son, born Wednesday evening in Charleston, West Virginia! Rachel and I are very proud to have created this little guy who will no doubt win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize in the future. I also expect Tony to be a start athlete, a famed academic, and a billionaire. Not that I want to put too much pressure on him. Right now, we’re focusing on getting him home from the hospital. I’ll teach him string theory next week.

I won’t be blogging for the next two weeks or so. I am on indefinite hiatus due to my wife giving birth. Will try to maintain activity on Twitter somewhat, but have to concentrate on what is important. Consider this an FMLA request and my readers are like the HR Manager. In the meantime, you could read Beer Run to pass the time. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5    

Hey, if you’ve tried to sell a book before, then chances are you’ve traded review with people, and if you’ve traded reviews with people, you’ve had to hold your nose and give five stars to book that couldn’t even bother to spell its own title correctly. In honor of that, I’ve decided to start a series of such reviews.

***

The Adventures of Duncan Crockett is an unconventional, post-modern story that some might call “nonsensical,” “dumb,” or “exploitative.” However, pull the veil back, and you will find a stark expose of the tropes of Christian Romance novels. Duncan Crockett, clearly an exaggerated archetype, is an ex-Navy Seal who personally shot Osama Bin Laden and now hunts down human traffickers for free. (He lives off his great personal wealth made by selling his own line of hunting equipment.) The story follows how he meets his wife by rescuing her from Jeffery Epstein’s private island.

That plot line is evidently absurd, which is why no one is supposed to take this book seriously. Clearly, this is some kind of joke. I mean, the author is clearly a skilled humorist, as he paints an absurd world where human traffickers try to randomly kidnap beautiful women waiting in line outside a movie theater. Crockett saves his wife from the clutches of her captors by vaporizing them with his heat vision. At the climax, Crockett discovers a world-wide sex slavery ring run by Nancy Pelosi. I mean, clearly it’s an act of satire. That’s why it’s so brilliant.

And as satire, it’s hilarious. Crockett kill 50 sex traffickers with his bare hands and then eats them. When he and his wife have sex on their honeymoon, angels visit them and bless their union by joining them. The angels are said to look exactly like “Reese Whitherspoon in Legally Blonde” and “Chevy Chase’s wife in Vacation.” The government doesn’t solve the human trafficking problem because they’ve all been hypnotized by Satanic powers, who have also gotten to Wall Street and Hollywood. No one could really believe this stuff.

The one place I would caution the author is with his explicit portrayal of racial stereotypes. I won’t repeat them here, but this book does contain very uncomfortable portrayals of blacks, Latinos, Jews, East Asians, Indians, Native Americans, immigrants, Arabs, Muslims, Jews again, East Europeans, Russians, and the Dutch. Now, I don’t hold this against the author, as clearly these ugly caricatures were meant to push the boundaries of good taste. That being said, others, hell, most, might find these portrayals to be offensive.

Overall, I give this book five stars. It’s an excellent book, once you understand it’s a satire. Yes, I know some of you in the comments are telling me its real, but you lack the trained eye to know a joke when you see one. Whoever wrote this is a comic genius.

I feel the need to begin this post with that disclaimer because it appears people are getting very sue happy these days and as an attorney I know I’m protected by Hustler v. Falwell if its satire. Of course, the truly funny thing about this is the sad reality.

***

I recently received some unfortunate news. It appears that my blog posts will no longer be automatically posted on Twitter due to a disagreement between Twitter and WordPress. While I have no problem posting links myself, I find this fact to be a little indicative of Twitter’s management as of late. Finding myself a bit frustrated, I decided to call Twitter and complain. The following is a transcript of my call.

(Dial Tone Three Times, then a pickup)

Heavily accented English: Hello Customer Service, this is Elon.

Me: Elon Musk? What the Hell are you doing answering the phones? You own the company.

Elon: Well, in case you haven’t heard, I made some layoffs to make the company profitable, and someone needs to man the phones.

Me: I mean, there’s no way you could be this understaffed.

Elon: Then there were the people who quit, because they hated working here, and then when others tried to tell me that, I fired them because you’re not supposed to tell the boss bad news.

Me: Okay, I get it. It’s for the best. I mean who better to complain to than you?

Elon: Well, I am pressed for time, so if you could hurry up.

Me: It’s about the WordPress thing. You know. Twitter isn’t automatically tweeting my blog posts when they go out.

Elon: You can’t do that on your own?

Me: Yes, but I am wondering what kind of disagreement you would get into with WordPress that would cause you to stop this service. It’s a small thing, but it makes people wonder.

Elon: They just weren’t being reasonable. I only asked to increase their annual fee by 500 percent.

Me: How much was the old fee?

Elon: Like, five dollars a year. They couldn’t pay $30?

Me: Mr. Musk, I think this goes to the fact that you never really understood how the internet worked.

Elon: I know how the internet works! I tweet! I watch YouTube videos! I’m not a Luddite!

Me: I mean you decided to buy Twitter without any experience running any social media company. It’s not like building electric cars or space travel. Being good at one thing doesn’t make you good at another.

Elon: Oh, so you are so smart. Well, let me ask you: how would you make money with Twitter?

Me: Most social media companies make money by selling ad space. Have you tried that?

Elon: (Hurried scribbles, as if desperately writing something down)

Me: (Sigh) Mr. Musk, maybe you should consider selling Twitter.

Elon: I won’t sell unless I have a buyer who will rigorously pursue the truth.

Me: Mr. Musk, Twitter isn’t about a pursuit of truth. It’s about seeking out your personal political echo chamber and shouting your views into it to have them repeated back to you. It’s about a million bots trying to sell porn or cryptocurrency to the most desperate people on the vast cultural desert that is the internet. It’s about hundreds of thousands of amateur authors trying desperately to sell their self-published books against all hope. Social media is a black hole of despair that people fall headlong into due to the lack of meaning that exists for them in the flesh world. Political correctness is just a symptom of the problem where people try to find community through online political groups that they can’t find in their daily lives. Making Twitter about the pursuit of truth would require abolishing it and founding some other website where people could explore complex subjects at length rather than being limited to three short sentences.

Elon: Huh, I guess you’re right.

Me: Right, so you will sell Twitter?

Elon: No, I’m going to continue destroying it with my shitty management born of mindless slogans and assumptions about business taken from entirely different industries. Then, after it’s dead, someone can found that other site you were talking about.

Me: I think it’s called having a blog.

Elon: Really? How do you do that?

Me: I use WordPress.

Elon: Great. Fuck you.

(The other side hangs up. Phone rings dead)

Here’s a short story I tried, and failed, to get published. I may as well put it on my blog. Hope you all enjoy it.

***

CEASE AND DESIST

            “And so, the Mothman caused the Silver Bridge to collapse, resulting in the deaths of 46 people!”

            Brian announced this with a well-practiced air of certainty while pointing to the site of the old collapsed bridge, now completely demolished. He stood on the cliff face overlooking the Ohio River with the setting sun behind him. The crowd clapped politely at the recitation of Brian’s unique spin on the Mothman myth. The younger ones gave a few hoots and hollars. The older fans up front took pictures of the place where the old bridge would have stood if it were still around. When you charge $20 for a Mothman tour, generally you weed out the sarcastic teenagers and get down to the real fans.  

            “Thank you for coming on the tour!” Brian finished. “Please visit the gift shop at the Chamber of Commerce before you leave town.”

            The collection of middle-aged monster enthusiasts, young cheap thrill seekers, and old school hippies dispersed from the end point of the tour back toward the direction of the center of town, no doubt headed anywhere but the Chamber of Commerce. Brian promised the Chamber he would make that pitch when the city council let him set up this business. All he had to do was promote the gift shop at the end. There didn’t have to be any actual increase in sales. He also agreed not to do anything to bring the city or its inhabitants into disrepute, so when he talked about the Mothman attacking teenagers in their car, he couldn’t mention what they were doing at the time.  

            One man with black hair and thin-rimmed glasses remained. Brian noticed him during the tour. It would be difficult to miss someone who went on a “Mothman” tour in a dark business suit, carrying a brown leather briefcase. The man stepped forward. 

            “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Mr. Hostetler, I’m going to have to ask you to cease and desist telling lies about my client…immediately.”

            “Lies? What do you mean lies?” Brian asked.

            “The Silver Bridge collapse?” the man responded. “That little story you told about how the Mothman caused the bridge to collapse, killing 46 people? That’s not what the government concluded.”

            Brian rolled his eyes. Yes, technically the evidence pointed to poor maintenance and a higher weight load than expected being the cause of the collapse, but that book from ’75 connected the bridge collapse with the Mothman. Brian just filled in the blanks. 

            “I know it’s a stretch, but it sells tickets,” Brian said.  “Who are you again?”

            “My name is Mr. Jonathon Stanley,” the man said. “And yes, I bet it does sell tickets. So does claiming that my client threatened teenagers and killed a dog.”

            “Well, that’s part of the legend,” Brian said. “Wait…your client?”

            “…Is very protective of his reputation, sir,” Stanley said. “This is a cease-and-desist letter, whereby we are asking you to stop conducting this little tour of yours without my client’s permission, as he owns his publicity rights, and turn over what remaining profits and assets you have collected by running this libelous tourist trap.”

            Stanley handed Brian a letter on official firm letterhead claiming that Stanley represented the Mothman, or more specifically, John Mothman,and telling Brian to stop his “Mothman tours” or face “immediate legal consequences.” Brian giggled as he perused this very “serious” letter. Oh, it looked so very legit. The firm name “Stanley & Rothbard” even sounded real. 

            “Oh, boy,” Brian mused. “I guess I better stop.”

            “Yes, you should,” Stanley said. 

            “No, thank you. I think I need to consult my own attorney,” Brian said, chuckling. “Of course, he lives in Washington, being a Sasquatch, so it may take a while for me to respond.”

            “If that’s your attitude,” Stanley said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to meet you in court.”

            “Really? Well, will I get to see your client if we have a trial?” Brian chortled. “I mean, I’d like to get a picture of him. So would every Ufologist and conspiracy theorist between here and Mars!”

            At this moment, Stanley’s eyes turned bright red. Two antennae sprouted out of his slick black hair, and two large insectoid wings emerged from his back. Brian stopped laughing. 

            “Gah,” Brian emoted, struggling to find words.

            “If you would like a picture, we aren’t exactly shy, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley responded, now fluttering above the ground.

            “Hmmm….” Brian managed to say. “You know, any attorney who represents themself has a fool for a client.”

            “Who’s doing that?” Stanley buzzed, his voice now vibrating in tune with his wings.  “My client is a cousin of mine.”

            “So, nepotism then,” Brian said. 

            “Another slander,” Stanley said, taking out a notepad and scribbling it down. “I’ll have you know I graduated from Washington and Lee Law School and attained Order of the Coif.  I argued a case in front of the Fourth Circuit last year.”

            “Right….” Brian responded, not knowing what half of that meant. “Could I offer an apology?”

            “For claiming my client murdered 46 people? It will take more than that, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley buzzed, his red eyes shining like traffic lights in the quickly darkening evening sky.  “I’m afraid you must compensate my client for the harm you’ve done to his standing in the community.”

            “Standing in the community?” Brian begged. “Why he’s never been more popular since I’ve started doing this! The festival has doubled in size! Last year, we got people from Poland!”

            “You were told to burnish the town’s reputation, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley said, flying around Brian in a circular manner. “My client has an understanding with the city council, and I believe the city council had an understanding with you. You were to not bring the city or any of its residents into disrepute. My client has lived here since the 1960s, and you’ve slandered him as a violent criminal.”

            “What?! That thing about the bridge?” Brian pleaded.  “That’s just puffery, man! I sell the sizzle, not the steak! Nobody believes that!”

            “Oh, how I wish that were true,” Stanley buzzed, now directly over Brian’s head.  “Unfortunately, our people have faced special hostility this year. I have siblings who’ve reported being attacked when they travel outside of Mason County. When you have antennae and compound eyes, people shoot first and ask questions later. Might have something to do with you telling tales. Something must be done about you.”

            Brian closed his eyes. He shook with fear as the buzzing of the wings approached his ears. Brian fell to the ground, groveling in fear. Then, he felt a piece of paper fall gently on his head. It was the cease-and-desist letter. 

            “Close up within 10 days and turn over your remaining business assets, or I’ll file a complaint in Mason County Circuit Court,” Stanley said.

            And with that, the buggy attorney turned in the direction of Gallipolis across the river and flew, leaving behind a business card indicating he was licensed in Ohio and West Virginia.  Brian watched as Stanley disappeared into the distance.

            “Damn,” he said. “I wonder if Champ has lawyered up yet. It’s still probably open season on him, and I hear Vermont is lovely this time of year.”