deeplyshallow // gentry lee is a tool

gentry lee is a tool

Another evening at the gym. Add ‘the gym’ to the list of places — church, Monday morning client meetings, elementary school just before recess or lunch — where a half hour feels like years. My legs are still burning from yesterday’s visit. And only three more consecutive nights to go. I will have nubs where my feet used to be when this week is over.

One of the guys I work with said, “Do you realize you’ve been shrinking ever since you started here?” I said that I knew, yes. Should’ve felt pretty good about myself after that, but I have just about had it with this whole weight-loss thing. I’ve been doing so well, see. Three months spent taking long beach walks, spent running my ass ragged in the gym, spent counting calories and passing on desserts, spent learning to love diet soda, etc. — all of that time has done me pretty good, and I’m thirty-five pounds lighter than I was when I started. Problem is, I’ve been thirty-five pounds lighter for, oh, three weeks now. Progress is at a standstill. I am still running through my routines, but I am losing patience with this bullshit. Every morning I am less excited at the prospect of weighing in. It will only lead to more disappointment, and eventually, me hurling the scale through the mirrored closet doors. (Which means I won’t be getting my deposit back, so maybe I’ll save that for the new place.)

Finished reading Rendezvous with Rama for the second time recently. There’s something about novels like that one that just piss me off. Actually, that isn’t true. There is something about Arthur Clarke that pisses me off. The man was really very good at what he did, and Rama is one of his most fascinating books. He ends it with the hint that more will come, and the first time that I read this book, I was grateful that it was 1998 and not 1972, because all of the subsequent Rama novels had long since been published, and I could read them immediately. Problem was, Clarke handed the series off to another author and just slapped his name on it — well, that’s the theory, anyway. The other author, Gentry Lee, had terrific credentials (he worked for NASA or JPL or some shit, and they’re just churning out award-winning authors over there). Lee knocked out three more Rama novels, bing bang boom, and forever fucked over one of the better science fiction stories of the last fifty years. Because those three books sucked, and sucked hard.

And I’m actually tempted to read them again in the hopes that I sold them short the first time around, just because I don’t want the story to be over yet.

Instead I’m moving on to the next paperback in my stack of books I never expected to have time to actually read. It’s a Vince Flynn novel that my cousin recommended to me about twenty million years ago and I am just now getting around to. I have to splice disposable novels like this into my reading list every so often, either to soften me up for a difficult classic, or to submerge my brain beneath after trying (and usually failing) at said classic. Case in point: I’m planning to read The Last of the Mohicans next, and if you’ve ever read it, or tried to, then you know exactly why I need to read a book about hit men who kill congressmen, and in which the author spends more time lovingly describing their semi-automatic weapons than actually developing the characters who use them.

One additional perk about reading novels like this: it is impossible to read more than two pages at a time without thinking, “I could do better than this.” Books like this sometimes actually motivate me to write. Although it’s a mixed blessing, this urge. Because the characters in my melodramatic soap operas are suddenly all carrying sleek blue-steel submachine guns, and they have time for wonderfully eloquent soliloquies before they get garroted to death in some compromising position. After two or three pages I always have to remind myself: this is a period piece about Betsy Ross and her secret affair with Mrs. Washington, man — so why, I have to ask myself, is Martha toting an Uzi?