7/14/2021

The Nonbinary Cowboy Cop: A Comic Monologue

I’m a maverick. I like to do things my way and I do things my way because it gets results. I’m a detective. Been a detective twelve years and I’m good, damn good, at what I do. Sometimes the rules are a wall, and you gotta be a crowbar. I’m a renegade – I don’t always follow the laws I’m enforcing. I’m a lone wolf, an outsider, from the social scene, from the country club, from the gender binary. I’ve got a drinking problem and I’ve been quitting the pub yearly for a decade now. I’ve got an ex-wife and an ex-husband but no kids. Can’t stand kids. Can't stand how dirty they are. Can’t stand dirty cops. I’m a compulsive germophobe. Hygienic to a fault. I do what I have to do, to keep myself sane and keep others safe. I hold everyone in contempt, especially those above me. I believe in results, not paperwork, in Getting Things Done even if the Things that are Getting Done aren’t the Things my superiors want Got Done. I’ve been asked for my badge three times, turned it in four, and I’ve still got my job. I don’t get along with my partners, until I do. When a criminal's rushing at you with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, if you're thinking about the rules your captain tells you about instead of pulling out a gun than it's like bringing a spoon to a gun-and-knife fight. Sometimes I think I should go independent, become a private detective. Wait for some lady with legs or a gentleman with arms to walk in. But I don't have the discipline for it. I'm a loose cannon, a powder keg, a hot potato that's just leapt out of the oven. I'm a problem for the City but I'm too good for them to let me go. I don't like suits or uniforms. I'll die doing this job and they'll bury me in a tuxedo. Life's hard. Real hard. 

7/09/2021

Brief Thoughts: Calvino, Eco, and Borges as writers 'of a piece'

Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges seem to me to be 'of a piece.' They are all writerly writers - now this is not so uncommon. Many writers, especially modernist and postmodernist writers, could be described as such. In and of itself, that isn't too unique. What make these three unique, in my eyes, is that they're also very readerly writers for a specific value of readerly - all three are fascinated by the act of reading itself. Borges, I would hope, doesn't need to be explained in this regard. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is about a Reader attempting to find a novel of that same name; and Eco's The Name of the Rose revolves around the contents of a missing work by Aristotle.

(Note: of these writers, I have read Borges's Ficciones, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and I'm in the middle of reading The Name of the Rose.)