Since I’ve already written one Avatar review while I was sober, I decided to take a crack at part two of my “Defense Against Religious Environmentalism” (DARE) writeup whilst under the influence of at least half (if not more) of a bottle of fantastic Malbec from Argentina. If I can stumble through with a modicum of my original thesis under wraps, I’ll consider it a good week.

I’ve discussed the logical and consistency errors that mounted in my mind as I was watching Avatar, as well as rudimentary philosophical issues I had with it upon reflection. My inclination is to throw in a few snarky comments to ease you into part 2, and the angel of my better nature has signaled to me, permitting one or two in this transmission. So wait for it. And read on.

It’s already been discussed elsewhere that Cameron’s screenplay falls neatly into the “White Savior Movie” (hereby designated as WSM) dilemma that seems to trap Hollywood (dare I say, liberal Hollywood?) from time to time. From Dances With Wolves to Pocahontas to To Kill a Mockingbird, Hollywood and progressive literates in general have tended to romanticize the somewhat staid and antiquated social position of the white man as both villain and hero of his own intrusive story. The mythos, as it’s been presented in popular entertainment and even lauded literary works, is that of a hungry, ambitious, and ultimately destructive race (the Whites) who invade, plunder, and overwhelm the simpler (yes) but nobler natives of North America/The Southern Courtroom/Pandora, who by themselves are incapable of rousing their own salvation. But the incursion of a curious White into the midst of the strange and beautiful foreigners (to him) renders a transformation, by which the White learns, sympathizes with, and eventually converts–goes Na’vi, if you will–and in so doing, is able to carry the day against his own people. By joining with the savages, the White (and it’s usually a white Man) achieves heroic status and salves his own colonial conscience.

That Avatar is, almost worshipfully, a model White Savior movie, may not need to be pointed out. One thing needs to be said, however. WSM and books are, typically, and ultimately, about the individual white man’s moral salvation. By joining with the savage, he himself is redeemed from the destructive pattern of his white, oppressor race. In that sense, WSM are doubly insensitive and doubly clueless–by turning the hero inward, WSM manage to make even the nobility of the savage a minor role in its own film–co-opting that in favor of the individual’s rise to awareness. The White Man thus manages to make his own story more important than that of the nobler race he has chosen to join. Even white colonial guilt is no match for the self-centered nature of the creator of the guilt-ridden story.

That aside, we should examine the exact relationship between Jake Sully (White Savior) and his adoptive brethren, the Na’vi. Much like Davy Crocket or John Smith, Jake learns to live within the Na’vi community while simultaneously maintaining his separate and distinct human identity. This is a classic identification problem–empathy with one’s fellow being is a difficult task without actually walking in the shoes of that fellow. Thankfully, Jake Sully gets to have his cake and eat it too, a situation exploited by both Colonel Miles Quaritch and by Dr. Grace Augustine, who are both interested in how the Na’vi think and act.

The interesting parallel I find between Jake’s training to become a Na’vi warrior and James Cameron’s wielding of technology is that neither demonstrate a true awakening of self. I’ll tackle Cameron first. With Avatar, James Cameron, a noted techno-buff and tinkerer, developed or introduced a number of innovative filmmaking tricks and techniques which no doubt will be utilized in more and more films in coming years. Likewise, Jake Sully spends three months developing and learning Na’vi skills–hunting, running, balance, fighting, as well as the more intimate issues–communing with the cattle-like beasts of Pandora through the creepy mind-control tendrils. Three months. Jake is so good in his proxy role of human-as-Na’vi that he is able to displace the native-born warrior Tsu’tey, who understandably takes a dislike to Jake, especially after Jake-as-Na’vi manages to bed Neytiri, the beautiful princess and Tsu’tey’s rightful bride (how patriarchal and quaint, Mr. Cameron!).

Cameron’s wielding of technology to achieve his master vision of this utopian conquistatador making ultimate contact with an alien race of advanced intelligence took significantly longer than three months, but its effect is nearly as schizophrenic as Sully’s bi-polar existence as human and alien. On the one hand, Cameron pits a race of technologically inferior aliens deeply in tune with their biological station battling to save their voodoo-computer-planetoid against the corporate, militarily (and by extension, technologically) advanced humans. And on the other, he gives us his fantastic vision by utilizing… technologically advanced filmmaking techniques and a lot of money (maybe he sold an unobtanium mine).

Oddly, while the humans have advanced so far as to achieve multi-light year space travel and successful cryogenics and hypersleep technology, they apparently didn’t advance much in the way of mining developments. I suppose to get the shiny rocks one must dig, but one guesses there should have been advances in the methodology. Even today, there are quite efficient and economic ways at getting to precious ores and natural resources we crave here on earth. One hundred and forty years from now, I have a difficult time imagining that our primary approach is still just “blow it up.” An opening shot in the film shows an advanced ship or space station of enormous scale deploying a solar sail, presumably used for propulsion, and the thought occurred that if human beings have this kind of technology, is there even a so-called energy crisis, as the token Republican tool Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) calls it? We see the disparity between Cameron’s techno-vision of future-world making and his philosophy–he conveniently allows for growth in certain areas (space travel) but not in another (mining) in order to make his bloody Fern Gully work.

But of course, technology isn’t really the problem in Avatar. Rather, it’s humankind’s inherent greed and bloodlust that Cameron wants to showcase. And showcase it he does. Explosions, bombs, laser-precise missiles, ships that can turn on a dime, and infantry-men who seem to have been born for a shaved head and single-track killer mind; Cameron makes sure we see every pixel of gleaming, computer-generated mayhem and massacre–in fact, he was so obsessed at us being able to watch his opus that he filmed the entire thing with two cameras, so we could see it in three dimensions, as if the flat version didn’t provide the obsessive fidelity to his philosophic interests that Cameron demanded.

And philosophically, Avatar runs into real headaches. Theologically, it’s all over the place. The Tree of Souls, where all the Na’vi commune with each other and the dear departed dead ancestors, seems to be a spiritual entity. Indeed, the Na’vi synthesize a communal sense of belonging to, if not outright worship of, an entity called Eywa, the “All Mother,” which is variously a tree spirit and the embodiment of all the energy of all living things in one construct. But as Dr. Augustine points out, it’s also like a computer network, a data center or cloud computing cluster where the Na’vi go to process. Is it spirituality or just an Internet forum for Pandorans? I’ll grant you a phosphorescent tree is better than a cubicle any day of the week (except for Casual Fridays, maybe), but let’s define the terms before we start with the mumbo jumbo. The Na’vi communicate with each tree, each living creature on the planet, and indeed, with the planet itself, via their neural connecting tails. Being the master race (apparently), they are able to control other Pandoran creatures with their minds.

In the end, it’s the Na’vi’s ability–or rather, the one human avatar–who is able to tap into the planetary network, harness the resources, and lead the fight against the predatory humans. So, is Pandora a spiritual place? And what is its relation to Earth, as Cameron would have us gather from the film? The self-sustaining Na’vi rely on intimate symbiosis with Pandora for survival, and if Avatar is remotely Green, as it seems to be, the call would seem to be for humans to adopt a more connective, conservative role with nature. Yet the Na’vi, with their mind-tendrils, seem specifically adapted for a more naturalistic existence. Indeed, if it weren’t for the mind relationship they have with the beasts they control, the Na’vi seem likely doomed as a species, or at least destined for evolutionary marginalization.

In the end Jake, as a human being, ultimately rejects his humanity and joins his mind with his avatar’s body to forever stay with the Na’vi. Humans, with their non-tendril polluting presence, are sent away, presumably to a dying and broken Earth, while Jake, reborn, gets to stay on Pandora. Is all this just evolutionary penis-envy? Humans, lacking in stature and spiritual symbiosis, are sent packing while the big blue forest dwellers maintain their pleasant, indolent lives. Notably, the reformed human gets the hot girl alien warrior while his one-time rival has to suck it up and hope one of the cheerleaders is available.

The critiques of Avatar upon contemporary Western life, especially or perhaps exclusively for the United States, tend to lapse into caricature, weakening Cameron’s evident enthusiasm for a more Eastern approach to existence. What might have been a truly delicate blend of characters with depth and emotion instead are stereotypically one-sided. Cameron’s apparent interest in Taoist philosophy, and a potentially pantheistic spiritual theme is lost without an underlying foundation. By excluding humans from the natural world (even that of Pandora), Cameron seems to indicate that humans are actually separate, distinct, and outside the realm of nature, and therefore acceptable to destroy (at least if they invade your homeland). At the very least, Avatar represents Western Man’s inability to reconcile his existence with his behavior. As Ross Douthat writes, “We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.”

But the fetishizing and spiritualizing of Nature has its consequences. We want to worship Nature, but Nature is violent, “red in tooth and claw”–even life on Pandora has its dangers–and the closer we get to Nature, the closer we are to our own mortality, and indeed, the mortality of other beings. So the double-edged sword that Cameron wields clumsily is this: get back to Nature in its bloody harmony, or you will be destroyed.

And here I was thinking the Na’vi just needed to open a few casinos.

Southern New Hampshire University/University of Limpopo South African Microenterprise Development Institution

Leave it to the Republicans to oppose microloans and small enterprise budget assists to economically disadvantaged persons of continents that begin and end with the letter A and don’t feature tiny Asian geniuses with advanced degree paths for minors. Yes, I’m talking about Africa and the Americas, two places where apparently it’s manifest destiny to die of starvation whilst your banana republic rulers and psychotic genocidal despots make mincemeat of the general populace instead of building the infrastructure and strengthening education pillars.

No, Alabama doesn’t apply, though you might have thought so. But while Fannie Mae is no longer giving out subprimes to backwoods illiterates, the clearest indicator of the success of the microloan principle is the fact that millions are presently living under the watchful eye of the welfare state. It’s not a lonely existence, nor is it devoid of merit. Why, just the other day Buck Muskrat and his family of eight began the long, arduous journey into the hills of Arkansas with intent to produce and distribute “mountain sweet water” across state lines. Thanks to government micro-handouts, they get to install new filters on their custom-built still, ensuring that their customers will no longer suffer debilitating blindness, retching, and liver disease.

But let’s transport the process overseas to the squalid savannas and craven cocoa fields. What happens when you give Swahili Sue a generous grant of two thousand American? Sue, with the entrepreneurial spirit of her long-necked ancestors, is able to collect shiny pebbles, paying the kids of distant tribesmen sweatshop wages to gather shells (dead animals or bullet casings, either one), while her cousin, the one who owns the funky bodega (which he secretly runs a Nigerian email scam out of), sells her radiator wire from junked and burned out vehicles. She now employs neighbors, who previously hacked *their* neighbors to death with machetes for a living, to construct necklaces and bracelets, which she is then able to ship to the nearest city market, where corrupt officials, after being given their own economic stimulus packages, allow her to maintain a booth in the market next to the biggest tourist draw in the city. Pretty soon Swahili Sue is pulling in $500 every month. After bribes and payouts, she is still the leader of the pack, and with her growing capital she’s able to employ even more.

Pretty soon she’s running a small shop inside an air-conditioned building. She gets calls from local politicians, who want her opinion on new zoning legislation. She threatens to move her business across the water if she doesn’t get a tax break from the local warlord, who it so happens, freaking loves those bullet casing necklaces. He cuts her a midnight deal, and now the two of them maintain one of the biggest jewelry trading outfits in the entire region. She’s making the real stuff now, including possible blood diamonds from south, in the Congo, but it’s funny how the greasy southerners always seem to have a fresh story about all the opportunity there is if you just open your eyes.

Swahili Sue is better than all that. She maintains a delicate balance, paying off the right officials to keep her operation running smoothly, but she also takes care of her people. Her factory floor fairly hums, and even pregnant workers get padded chairs to sit on while they set stones, hand-embroider little suede bags, and stuff pendants into jewelry boxes. This is the reality–you can’t run a business here without feeding the monkey, and the monkey drives a lot of cars, usually bulletproof vehicles with tinted glass and built-in bars with the country’s second best Amarula and ice. Sue looks at the papers every day to know what’s coming down the road–which ethnic cleansing may clean her country’s house next, which politician she’ll want to cozy up to and which one she’ll want to steer clear of.

And at the end of the day, when she’s selling her company to a guy who thinks he’s a businessman because he ran a regional sugarcane distribution center and whose rich uncle is subsidizing him, she’ll think back to that first $2000 someone gave her, and wonder how she came so far with so little.

But when it comes to Space Marines who just killed Gaia, f*** ‘em.

At least, that’s how it works in James Cameron’s warped, simplistic, Greenist fantasy. The man knows how to spend money, and he spends it wisely amping up the effects and kludging out the notoriously problematic 3D. What you can’t spend money on, but doesn’t come free, is the ability to write a decent script, one that balances the need for a mainline movie-fare plot with some level of moral ambiguity, rich character development (not caricature regurgitation), and delicate thematic foundations. Here’s an idea: how about making your villain a guy who is simply trying to make the world a better place, but manages to screw over the world in the process, as opposed to making him 100% asshole without a shred of redeeming characteristics or sympathetic reasoning?

In case you haven’t seen Avatar yet, the aforementioned piehole villain is what Cameron ended up slashing his budget on, and his presence in the film severs a necessary artery of willing disbelief. We gave Cameron the benefit of the doubt, allowed him to shuttle an endless (and meaningless) spiritual mumbo jumbo onto our plate in exchange for some truly revolutionary graphics, mo-cap work, and a barrage of visual spectacle. So far, okay. Then, on top of the moral preening, we are presented with a cast of characters who, to the man, with the very slight exception of the hero, are one-dimensional, wrapped not in their own packaging but in Cameron’s. He commits the mortal movie sin of making his characters say, act, and believe exactly as he does, or to behave in ways Cameron believes and wants us to believe are morally reprehensible.

Disregarding the flawed premise that Cameron actually has a valid, or even discussion-worthy philosophy underpinning his writing sins, we must face the inexorable truth: his characters are simply uninteresting.

To catch up you up, Avatar is about a crippled Marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is enlisted by two wings of a distant future bureaucracy, military and scientific, to embody, via mind-link technology, to a DNA-replicated, lab-grown alien body. The alien is of the Na’vi race, a twelve-foot tall blue oddly-beautiful clan of forest-dwellers who reside on Pandora, a planet rich with phosphorescent plant-life, huge trees, and prehistoric-animals. The scientists, including Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), want him to join the Na’vi, learn their ways, and attempt a peaceful negotiation with them, with the end goal being acquisition rights to a mineral of unimaginable value (with the unlikely name unobtanium, as in, unobtainable on Earth 1). It just so happens the Na’vi’s treehouse is growing over Pandora’s largest lode of unobtanium, and where the scientists are looking for a diplomatic solution, the military, headed by the psychotic Major Assman (Stephen Lang), just wants to blow it up and take it by force.

Sully learns the way of the Na’vi, who commune directly with every living being on the planet via twisting tendrils in their tails, don’t trust the Sky People, but they accept Jake into their clan and he grows more and more sexually confused as he falls in love with a pretty girl Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

When negotiations break down and the Major Asshat starts bulldozing everything in sight, Jake flips sides–choosing to fight with the Na’vi, leading the gentle forest-dwellers against the might of the US military.

You get the idea.

The list of ridiculous, I-wish-this-were-parody features Cameron built into Avatar made the viewing of, and subsequent mulling over, a puzzling adventure, one in which I found myself reverting back and forth from mesmerized interest in the visuals to perplexed amusement at the obvious and simplistic views presented as some kind of Gaia-canon.

The Na’vi are intelligent, perhaps even more so than humans. Yet they eschew technology and development in favor of spiritual connection with the planet. Their weapons are sticks and arrows, their main transportation is either by running, flying on the backs of bird-creatures, or riding on the backs of horse-creatures. They possess tribal instincts, with a hierarchy of patrimonial civic leaders headed by a matronly spiritual leader. They are, in other words, Native Americans.

Yet just like the Ewoks on Endor, they manage to fight and defeat a planet-busting military-industrial complex, a war machine of impeccable efficiency with mechanized death squads, impenetrable armor-plated tanks, superfly hovercraft, and deadly weaponry–and they do so with sticks, arrows, and pteradactyls.

Color me skeptical.

Comparisons to current military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t hold up under scrutiny. Next to Major Hat-Of-Ass and his offensive, the US military looks like a bunch of Greenpeace activists writing the next Port Huron statement. The military of Cameron’s digital dream is bent on one thing–conquest, and follows no rule except one: Rule Pandora. Apparently, committees and Congressional hearings and military tribunals don’t exist in the future.

Given the Na’vi’s lack of technological development, and the butt-whupping they receive before Jake Sully rallies them all to jihad–I mean, totally respectable fight against the oppressors–they must gather all the beasts and fellow Na’vi from the four corners of Pandora to help. While I suspect Pandora is a smaller planet than our Earth, it surely must take more than a half a day to travel all the way around. But apparently, not only do they manage this incredible feat, they do so without transportation technology. They don’t even have Greyhound.

See, in Cameron’s world, if you are human, you’re either barely worthy of contempt, or you’re just plain psychotic, dangerous, and worthy of death. If you’re a Pandoran savage, on the other hand, you’re inherently noble (even if you are a vicious, needy savage). The myth of the noble Indian really, really, really didn’t need Cameron’s belabored update.

In Cameron’s world, it’s okay to kill something, but only if you use a bow and arrow and a knife and are a twelve-foot tall alien. In Cameron’s world, slavery and military subjugation is wrong, unless you are biologically connected to and can control other living beings with your tail. Then it’s okay. In Cameron’s world, there’s only one branch of the military, only one fighting force, and only one person who controls every aspect of its deployment and personally supervises unmitigated, unilateral slaughter. And his name is Major Ass-for-a-Face.

In Cameron’s world, science and observation leads to understanding and respect for other races and species. In Cameron’s world, primitive tree-huggers defeat star-traveling, atom-smashing, gun-toting butt-munchers. In Cameron’s world, there’s only one Unobtanium deposit, and it’s under a f***ing sacred tree.

I think you get the point.

Edit: It struck me that perhaps I was being too hard on Cameron. After all, no one really expects subtlety and nuance from a man who spends $300 million to make what boils down to a creature feature. But then I have to ask, after plunking down $12.50 to help him recoup his costs, is it too much to want at least a fraction of genuinely original, thought-provoking movie sci-fi from one of the acknowledged craftsmen of the genre?

The answer is no, it’s not.

2034. Memento mori. Thought that would sink in, this far out. That black, undeniable emptiness of it all. Damn, he would have none of it. Raving about eternal life after Assumption, whatever that meant. Then he left dock. Just walked right out into the interstellar, left the dock wide open. What a Marmaduke. Left a note in his satchel inside his locker, along with a photograph of Helen.

When you’ve found me, you will think it was the end of me, but it will have been only the end of my beginning. Farewell.

2167. Something sir. Cast. Exoskeleton, maybe. White.

Photo courtesy of Fox

No, I wasn’t a special guest star on FOX’s Fringe, regrettably. I’ve always wanted to meet Joshua Jackson, ever since Mighty Ducks, and now I can add Lance Reddick to my list of B/C-list celebrities I’d like to get into a long conversation with about the state of the world. That man has more expression in three wrinkle lines of sardonic disbelief than any of the gazillion atoms in Megan Fox’s entire body. Which still isn’t saying much, but I’d still rather have him behind my microphone than Fox, who I and my fiancee lovingly refer to as “Dumdum.”

But I digress. Fringe is one of the few shows I actually watch regularly and somewhat religiously. When I first saw billboards for it last year I found myself giddy that someone in television land was finally capitalizing on the name that has become a staple for my brand name. Obviously, running a blog for 6+ years helps boost one’s ratings in the search engines, but it’s happily in second or third place (depending on the hour and day) just behind the eponymous show’s official Fox site. I’d capitalize on the brand and try to make some dough, but really, what am I going to do?

However, I’d like to try to post something about each week’s show if I can, at least as much as I can given my lousy blogging schedule and practice. Maybe an episode cap, or a review, something. It only seems right that I have some opinion on the show that shares my blog’s name. So I suppose I could just lay out a few thoughts while I’m here.

It goes without saying that you may not want to read further if you haven’t watched the show and don’t want the fun to be spoiled. In other words, here be spoilers.

My general philosophy of the Fringe universe, one that probably mirrors most other viewers’ with respect to alternate dimensions, bifurcated paths of fate, and other oddities associated with a world that is inherently under constant construction (vis a vis the needs of the writers to connect previously unconnected story material into a cohesion of sorts), is that Fringe is of course one of several, if not an infinite number of, universes or dimensions or realities, whatever you want to call it. However, I submit that the Fringe world we’ve heretofore been introduced is actually already several generations beyond the “original” Fringe universe. Clues that point to this include the demonstrative graph drawn by Walter Bishop on the whiteboard revealing the tree-like growth of alternate universes based on choices made.

Now, my personal theory on alternative fates and bifurcated futures, which I will apply to the Fringe universe simply because it’s just so darn commonsense, is that only “major” choices graphically affect the creation of a “new” branch of universe–in other words, fate is the province of the magnificent and grand, not the puny or insignificant. Presumably the choice between a Reuben and a PB&J would not force the universe into a new line of being–unless, of course, that choice could be said to have formed a definite and tangential–but connected–link between matters of serious nature and those that are merely pedestrian.

If I were to eat a PB&J versus a Reuben, the odds are slim, though not impossible, that by making that choice, a significant change is made in the fabric of time/reality. On the flip side, by assassinating a world leader, or discovering a cure for cancer, I will have created a vastly different landscape, one that, by virtue of the impact it has on the human psyche, automatically creates a new virtual shift in the dimensional matrix–a new branch of reality now following along the lines of that major occurrence. Had I not found the cancer cure or killed that world leader, the world would have remained on that particular path until eventually, someone would cause the shift.

Craig Blankenhorn/Fox

Thus, the universe might be seen as a very tall, thin, but wildly curved line of choices and actions. Presumably, the world in which the cure for cancer is not found continues on its merry way, while we in the now-cancerless world continue on in ours. Because as we all know, in the world of ours, populated at its core by tiny particles and energy packets, action isn’t the only action–omission is itself an action, and has its own consequences. Likewise, knowing whether the act has occurred or not implies that it has indeed occurred–and indeed has also NOT occurred. So we now have a vaguely ethereal universe, a crocheted and bent universe strangely wispy, as if the strands holding these lines of action together could dissipate–and the truth is, they can. If one were to step outside of the very essence of time itself, one would see the exact shape of the universe–and for that observer sitting outside of the reality of alternate choices and actions, there would be no winding tree of truth–it would be a simple straight line, appearing as if no choices have been made at all.

My theory on the Fringe universe, then, is that all choices have been made and have not been made–our characters, Olivia, Peter, Walter, and all the sub-players, are making their dents in the chain of being. Some, like the killing of Charlie, have altered the branch of reality–not significantly, perhaps, but it’s a big enough shift to notice on our graph. The shift between parallel universes also has the promise of altering the path–though ironically it is not being done by conscious choice, so the question remains–exactly what is Olivia doing, and how?

For now, I am happy to ruminate on the possible outcomes of Fringe Season 2. Do we continue to explore the prospect of the two universes that we’ve seen so far colliding in an epic war, as William Bell fortells? Or will FOX cancel it and leave its continuation up to speculators like me?

Photo copyright 1997 by Kelly Chien

You may or may not know that for the last year I’ve been working on a novel entitled Wayland. It is the story of a man who travels across the ruined landscape of America with a young boy. Unlike Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this is not the story of a hopeless post-apocalyptic future, but is rather the story of the redemption of a monstrous man who nevertheless strives to be good in the face of his sins. While the story does contain what amounts to a zombie outbreak, the bulk of the story focuses more on the main character’s childhood (told in flashbacks) and his relationship with the young boy he is traveling with.

Themes of the novel revolve around information theory, recursion and computer programming, psychic landscapes and geographic neuro-networking, and epigenetics (the study of the development and maintenance of an organism orchestrated by a set of chemical reactions that switch parts of the genome off and on at strategic times and locations).

To help me begin the prep work of pitching and selling the novel to publishers, I want to set up a website for the book. And that’s where you come in.

CONTEST: Submit a domain name that is evocative and to the point.

RULES: To submit, you must @fringeblog on Twitter OR leave a comment in this blog entry by no later than October 13, 2009. There is no purchase necessary to enter the contest. You must be a citizen of the United States and at least 13 years old to enter the contest. Contest is valid from September 23-October 13. Contestants are allowed no more than five entries each.

Valid entries must contain an available .com domain name. Due to the nature of domaining, I will only be able to verify whether domains are actually available at the end of the contest. I will choose from the pool of submissions one domain that I feel works for the novel.

The winning entry will become the new domain for Wayland.

THE PRIZES: A signed copy of Wayland, a copy of 28 Days Later DVD ($16.99 retail value), and a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com. DVD and gift certificate will be sent to winner no later than October 30, 2009. Copy of Wayland will be sent to winner when book becomes available for printing, either through a registered publisher or through an independent publishing entity.

WAIVERS/LIMITATIONS: Winning entrant agrees to waive all present and future rights to the domain. By entering contest you agree to allow Fringeblog.com and the author to use your name in advertising, marketing, publicity, and informational materials related to the book Wayland.

Fringeblog.com will not be held liable for any damages or injury to persons or things as a result of the acceptance of offered prizes.

Email or Twitter me for more information or questions.

With wind in our sails we swept through seas’ endless foam, the formant of the trough, the sharp cry of eagles at our backs, the distant land of the bayou behind the fog bank. We were obscured at last.

Then night fell, and none of us could see a thing, not in that pitch. The roll of the deck, the flight of sail cloth as it shimmered in the glimmering wind atop in the mast, the direction-less stars lending no design to our ultimate destination. We sank and fell as we crossed dune after endless dune of black murky wet webbing. We were motionless. We drank sea air through holes in our clothes, and our hair grew salty, our skin cracked like ashes on a burning log.

We were cast adrift.

Five of us. Men, except for Alice. China, Archibald, Neumann, and me, Pie. And Alice.

We all shared her, like she shared us. Moments of camaraderie broken with instances of intimacy, silent undulations underscoring the twofold lovers, sometimes Neumann, sometimes Pie, sometimes it was Alice and me, our bodies molding into one, as the others looked on, or out, over the ocean, looking for land. The intervals were short.

Alice was always silent during, and the only sound, other than the flapping and the cracks of tar-shorn Viking timber, was hardened breathing.

We went like this for days. The sun always shone. The clouds always moved in a southwesterly direction above us, following the byways of some interspatial coded map, a heavenly causeway broken with wisps and tendrils of faint white. Blue longer than the eye could hold a steady gaze.

We didn’t talk much. There was never much conversation between us on land, but out here, under the ocean of the sky, atop of the empire of the fish and crabs, we were all waiting, holding silence for answers to questions we dared not ask. Our human skin was too fragile for those answers.

So we sailed on, our topmast holding, prevailing against stronger gusts, the sun going like a bicycle wheel across the concrete horizon, echoing with blistering pins upon the frolic of the sea water. Day fell into a black night, and we slept sprawled out on canvas and plastic, wrapped into netting to keep warm. We’d sometimes huddle, our bodies together once again in communal energy, Alice in the center, our backs and stomachs bulwarks from fear. From night, back into morning that grew light, not gradually, but in an instant, seemingly from the hand of God into the sky. Light, bright and warm, and we rode the day through, and sometimes Alice, until evening fell again.

After a while, Neumann started crying. Great tears. Silent but for a gentle sob and the sniffling, salty skin absorbed the tears, and China ventured a hand to Neumann’s shoulder. His eyes were great and red and puffy, but in the dead calm center, a wilted blue, clear and piercing.

He said he could not see. Waving our hands about his face produced no reaction.

Later we fed him, and he sat by himself through the day, not venturing to the center of the boat, but trailing his hand over the edge into the water, he hung across it like a beached Christ, head hanging low, hair slung about his shoulders, and staring with those clear, dead eyes, into the depths.

I estimated our time upon the water at thirty days. China and Archibald thought it had been longer, but Alice, perhaps more aligned and knowing with her biology and sex, put us at no more than twenty-two days. We had forgotten to keep count. Neumann did not offer his estimate.

Food was running low. We gave ourselves five, six days left with the biscuits in plastic sealed containers, and bottled water for ten days, maybe less. Days were hot, the sun drying us out, and we had already gone so long without seeing land.

We made love less. Our spirits weren’t in it, and Alice said she was menstruating. I put it to a vote, and we agreed to give her an extra ration of water for three days. It was all we could spare. She protested, and refused to drink the extra portion allotted her. Neumann also did not drink, and threw his biscuit overboard. Archibald nearly throttled him; it took China and I all our diminished strength to wrench him away, the boat tipping and rolling against the flurry of action. Our bodies made warmer by the heat of some kind of battle.

That night, Archibald took Alice and laid into her, flesh slapping against flesh until she cried out. Archibald slumped over her for a moment, as if stung by some guilty thought, then withdrew, and faced away from all of us, fingers stretched out and touching the interior of the boat shell. He fell asleep that way.

Alice cried, curled in a fetal ball, body shaking with sobs.

I fell asleep with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique awash in my brain, the percussive music deviling the lovely silence.

That night, Neumann expired. When we rose, it was light, golden beams casting shadows in the boat. Neumann was slumped over and his face had the crinkled age of a much older man. His beard had grown salty brown, streaks of white and gray ash, giving his face the appearance of moths, or a deserted circus tent.

China and I conferred together over the body. Alice and Archibald had retreated to opposite ends of the craft and were staring mindlessly. China wanted to pitch the body, but I suggested wrapping him in one of the canvas tarps. To what end, China wanted to know, and I told him that I didn’t know, it just seemed more decent than dumping the body into the drink. But what I really thought I didn’t say. I was thinking about food.

In the end, China’s suggestion prevailed. We stripped off his clothes. China tied an iron sledge head to Neumann’s torso. Archibald and Alice stood apart, watching. I said a prayer as and then China and Archibald and I lifted Neumann’s slight frame, tilted it sideways, and let him slip over the edge. He floated for a moment, and I was concerned the iron was not heavy enough. But a moment later the body sank into the murk, little eddies disappearing as the great sea pushed on.

For the next few days, things were better. Archibald and Alice were still not talking, but our food and water needs had lessened. China and I invented a game, we called Nation. We began with A. Whoever could name the last country beginning with that letter would win. At first, China suggested the stakes be a hundred bucks when we returned to commerce, but I was feeling monstrous. I told him the stakes needed to be more personal, more immediate. We decided to play for an extra bit of water, to come from the other’s ration.

In this way, we would progress through the globe, conquering as our memories and geography lessons would allow. We offered to let Alice and Archibald play, but they declined in silence.

Our appetites grew, and grew fierce. We were squabbling over food now, and our water supply had dwindled alarmingly. We discovered a hole in one of the bladders and set to blaming each other.

In the afternoon, China and Alice made love, and then as Archibald looked on, I joined them. Together we plundered each other’s bodies with pirates’ abandon, fiercely, cruelly, and even sweetly, returning kisses and half-meant touches, as above in the clouds a gray light grew.

The first lightning strike stopped our carouse. We disentangled our limbs. I heard Archibald mutter something under his breath, and he scowled as he looked at us rising and returning to our tattered clothes.

China and I removed the sail, while Alice covered our store with the canvas. Then we sat. We waited as the wind rose. The air grew chilly, and the day darkened into a brown muck. Upon the horizon, flashes broke from sky to strike upon the water.

The storm brought out fear, and from fear anger rose. Voices raised, shouting became clamor, and the wind strove to drown it, the sound of our fighting. Nature prevailed. The sea rose, and the lightning fell, and despite the uncertainty in the clouds, it did not rain. We were not to be blessed with new water.

But our boat was a marble upon a rock. We bounced, sure our fates were to be spent bounding from high sea mount to low trough. In the chaos, we seemed to shrink. The maelstrom made us smaller.

A wave washed China away. He hung on like a stunt worker but the twisting vessel broke him and he sailed into the crush, smashing through the wall of water that rose above us. His body was utterly insignificant next to that wave. The water came upon us in an instant, dashing us and splintering the mast. We hung on to the gunwales, nearly gone ourselves. China had disappeared without a sound.

When we awoke, we discovered our food had been washed away. I calculated three days’ water for each of us. Alice and Archibald took the news in silence, but later I heard Archibald laughing to himself, his body almost wracked with some humor only alive inside his head.

Alice came to me that night. Archibald was watching, lying with his head propped against the edge. He squinted as she slipped the tatters off her shoulders, shrugging off her cut off pants. She stood naked facing me, her back to Archibald, and she slid her hands over my body. Alice took control that night, and I let her move above me. I simply watched, the small of her belly, now wistfully thin, moving almost in an echo of the boat sway. Her skin was stretched, hair strung loose and white with salt crystals.

I felt nothing.

When she was finished, she fell asleep next to me and I covered her with her broken rags, and I looked over at Archibald. He grinned at me, then turned his head aside. I sank back down.

The next morning I saw Alice standing over Archibald. She had donned her shirt, which was already worn through with corrosion, but her bare buttocks and spindly legs balanced against the swells that came and went. I watched a moment, and realized Archibald was still sleeping. I slipped back down, my head lying in the indentation of some roll of netting, and settled back into sleep.

What seemed moments later, but was really much more than that, I awoke suddenly with the vague sensation of something sitting upon my chest, a heavy darkness that prevented me from moving for several moments, though I could sense the motion of the ship and felt the concave mold of the ship, where my body was lying. I yelped, pulling myself out with a will and effort to combat the paralytic muscles that bound me. I could move again.

I smelled smoke, and above the lapping of water against the hull I heard a crackle, sharp and bright in the air, and the smell of cooking meat. I drew my breath in through my nostrils, savoring it, imagining it to be a succulent sausage, for that was what my atrophied brain had kept hold of, somewhere in the dark webbing of neurotic synapses. That sharp tang of pork, the slavering bristle of heat on animal flesh. I wanted to cry, it smelled too much of home.

I looked over. Alice, hovering over a metal pan, squatting, coarse cloth hanging down in front obscuring her inevitable pudenda, and I was shocked at how much of a skeleton she looked, striated ribs like keys on a piano emerging from beyond her skin to protrusions of want. The striations were a sick parody of the joy of repetition, as if revealing them over time produced some inner beauty of the human form. She did not see me gazing at her.

I could not tell while I was lying, but as I rose up on stiff arms, the sound of the cooking changed, and I saw Alice lift a strip of well-cooked meat in the air, blowing upon it. As she did so she saw me and the look changed from contented anticipation to sharp repulsion, or suspicion, as if I was a thief and she a well-dressed courtier.

It was then that I saw Archibald, his head lolling to the side, blank expression, and his torso a mess where Alice had carved into him. With what, I could not guess, as we had no knives. Blood was every where. It had seeped into the wood and even now had darkened and formed a skin, as if it were milk being heated. Her face relented, and she nodded, pulling me over toward the pan and the frying slivers of Archibald.

Alice did not say anything, but offered the piece to me in conciliation. I looked at Archibald’s dead form again, but he looked less human now than even a minute before. Now he was a shapeless bulk of cargo, as if dropped from the sky, and the vaguely humanoid form had taken on a lumpy appearance. It was no longer even the shell of a person; it was simply a mound, a natural resource to be used for our survival. Alice had chosen Archibald, and he had gone without a sound, while I slept, while I dreamed.

I took the piece of meat from Alice’s hand, the meat warm but not hot, and its texture was strangely fibrous, loose, like I imagined a cow’s tongue might be. It flopped, a slice of bacon, and I sniffed it. The unmistakable scent of pork. Was this what we were? Were we simply another kind of barnyard animal, moving and floating about on this endless sea? Were we food in some others’ larder? Fodder for some others’ feast?

I took the slice in my mouth, savoring its woody, almost gamy entrance upon my tongue. I had tasted it before, in smaller doses, in hundreds of dishes, but those had always been close-ups of a painting by Seurat. Now I was engaged with the whole piece, the taste pure in my mouth, and I was able to take in the entirety of the flavor, its ramifications, its intentions. Archibald was not magnificent, not like a work that survives after centuries and eons. But the taste of him, in that one moment, was like the rush of sentiment and cultured sense of identity when one gazes upon great art, and for a moment, is joined with it.

Alice and I ate in silence, and when we were full, we wrapped up the remaining portions in the canvas that had been our only warmth.

“I loved him,” she said to me later. We had moved him to behind the shill boxes, now empty except for straw, and cracking from the weather. Now we were lying amidships. We were wearing nothing now except a sash around her left shoulder, between her breasts and up the fine blond hairs of her back, and me, a slip of cloth over my mentula. I held her hand up and we felt the wind, and the scent of the sea covering the aroma of our meal, which we had taken care not to gorge down. We were spare, if nothing, and comfortable in eating just enough.

“What will happen to us?” I asked her. “When we land, I mean.”

“I don’t know if I want to land anymore,” she said. “Where would we go? What is left for us?”

“Society.”

“I think we’re all that really matter now. What’s back on land is not real. It’s just the big fading blue horizon and us that is real. All that and nothing else.”

I still had my love, my connection to the land, the nostalgia of breathing salt-free and inside, away from the wind. I wanted still the feel of fabric not tortured. I wanted to sleep in a bed. I wanted the feel of a woman around me, or a man. Skin. Any human contact.

This. This was not what I wanted.

And I knew that when we were through with Archibald, we would no longer just be two people on the ocean. It was one for the sake of the other.

I held Alice’s hand, squeezed it tightly and we both looked up into the blue where there were no more clouds.