Michael Crichton. Chapbook banter. G1. Talking with customers.

It's always sad when somebody dies, especially a writer. So it's definitely sad to hear Michael Crichton has died at the age of 66. Truthfully, I never read much Crichton. Not because I didn't like him or anything... I always seemed to browse by his stuff for casual reading. I did read Jurassic Park, though, and part of Rising Sun.

Sad.


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I might but putting some of my chapbooks in my mom's shop for sale/free/people just need to read it. Frightening idea. I sent a copy of my chapbook to Muncie pal Dan Bailey. When I sent it, I thought about the day in Mark Neely's poetry class when Dan and I spent 75 straight minutes doing mad libs while everyone else listened to a poetry video. Such cool shit.


Did you get that? Let me mail you my chapbook. Hide it in your top drawer like your stash, like your girlfriend hides her electric blue vibrator from your impotence. I want this chapbook to become the center of your universe.


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I usually could care less about cellphones. They're like computers: every month, there's something new, faster, silmmer, fancier, complete with more buttons. But the stars must've been aligned in some galaxy because I renewed my contract and after fucking around with the TMobile Google G1, I bought it.

Bitchin'? Yeah. It's one of those phones that you take into the can when you know it'll take you 20+ minutes to empty your bowels. Email, texting, pictures, music, everything.

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Speaking of Michael Crichton, a customer today at work was actually the one who informed me. He was carrying a dingy paperback copy of Jurassic Park and cracked some third-rate joke about selling it on eBay, since it'll be worth something now.

Oh? I wrote the guy off. He told me Crichton was dead. Cancer. I always get this anxious feeling when somebody talks about the recently desceased. Then the guy started talking about Crichton's writing and it was the best critique ever. This man wasn't pretending he had all the answers.

In fact, he had none. He just talked about how the writing made him feel. "The kitchen scene in Jurassic Park made my wife and I die. We surely thought those kids would be dead." I started thinking about the scene in the movie (the book's rendition wasn't clear for me) and I could see the velocaraptors breathing on the kids faces, and their skin was flying back like when you're going down a hill on your bike. The corners of your eyes get dry, your feet go limp, trees get shorter and squattier.

And CGI dinosaurs made this man feel that way.