Hi, Honey; I'm home.

Yeah. So. This shoulda been a couple days ago, on Monday, when I was supposed to have done this; but I got a headache, so we bumped it. And now it's today.

So, I went in as a guest speaker lecturer sorta something, as an example of a guy breaking every known rule of punctuation and grammar and literature and whatever else sounds like me. Which I considered filming, of course; but the college has some Expectation of Something or Other rule against filming and uploading pretty much anything on the campus. They have other rules too—some far, far sillier. Like NO SKATEBOARDING, which, that being on signs throughout the galaxy, is actually enforced; they'll arrest you for it. And NO SMOKING WITHIN 25 PARSECS OF ANYTHING, and whatever else. Just a reminder that socialism is diet fascism, liberally spreading whatever rights no one—exactly no one—could ever potentially object to.

But anyway....

Having said all that, maybe I shouldn't mention precisely which college/university/soviet recruiting centre this is. Obviously it's in Denver. Kinda downtownish. Yeah: that one. So let's move on....

I kinda went into this blind. Ish. I mean: I went to college, in a time called the eighties, back when school was only twenty thousand per semester. Back, also, when people in college were in college because they wanted to be in college, and not because an unwritten law has pushed collegiate matriculation up to a right, and beyond, to a compulsory act. So today was a little astonishing. Who knew people in college were capable of developing an attitude about having to be there. I do remember that from the eighties—that day, around the first week, when I found out what college actually meant:

'And, we're outta time,' says the teacher, 'Be back here tomorrow at eight.'
'Do I have to?' I joke.
'Nope,' says the professor, 'But I assume you'll want to be, since you're paying for this shit.'

That's how college worked back then, when I was twelve. Today, kids ten years older than that are whimpering about having to be alive on a Wednesday. The world seems to have changed.

Other things have changed too. But that's my fault. Like how guest speaker lecturer whatevers do things. I wasn't gonna be that guy. As heavily recommended as it was that I should bring in a copy of every book I've written [I'm assuming that was limited to stuff I've written as Gremlin, since my backpack lacks infinite space], what I did instead was didn't. I remember those goofs from the days when I was facing the blackboard: selfimportant twerps apparently there to sell books. Which is inaccurate. They were there to sell book. Singular. That one they'd written, making them therefore authors. No one likes those people. So, that ain't me. I left the books at home.

So the focus was this thing I banged out over the course of half an hour back in June or so. Which I'd actually forgotten entirely about. Something I'd written because I had nothing better to do while waiting for MondoHebe to get unstuck from traffic and meet me at the pub, which wasn't WiFied. So, to kill time, without the ability to go online and look anything up, I did this: Offline.

Incidentally, you might wanna go read that real quick. Then we can move on.

I might have just deleted the thing, since I wasn't personally thrilled with it. But it was on the netbook when Hebe showed up after thirty minutes, so I let him read it. Based on that, he wanted to use it in class to show how to break all the rules he tells people not to break. Which brings me in to defend a dissertation for the first time in a while.

I really kinda wish I coulda filmed that. Even just for the audio. But: NO SKATEBOARDING.

Here's the punchline, in advance. I'm assuming you've gone and read the PDF. If not: seriously, go do that first; here be spoilers.

We start up the class. Hi there; this is Gremlin; he writes books and stuff; and also this thing; I'll read it while everyone follows along with his own copy; great. And he reads the story, word for word, everyone else reading along, me reading along since I've kinda totally forgotten the thing, and we get to the end. Remember the end? Because you read it? Good. Questiontime.

What do we know about this guy in this room. What sort of guy is he. What's his opinion of the world. What makes him this way. Basic, banal studygroup shit. And various answers, most of them guesses.

Now. Something I mentioned to the class, that I should mention here: there are no wrong answers. There are no right answers. All I know is what's written down. I didn't really plot anything out, apart from what I wrote. If I know it, you know it. So the various guesses were really kinda cool. There were guesses that the guy'd worked for NASA and got sacked and held a grudge; there were guesses that the guy was crippled and couldn't leave the house; there were guesses that the guy was stark, raving mad with a fridge full of catsup and nothing else. And there was the guess that the world outside was fully into armageddon.

I call that a guess, because everything had something of a questionmark to it.

On hearing that, Hebe—you remember Hebe: the professor, who's read the story, and wants to use the story in class—looks at the last couple paragraphs, and:

'I guess...maybe...I can see where you'd derive that.'

So, something's wrong here.

So he turns it over to me to confirm and deny all of this. And of course I have no idea about most of it. Except for the armageddon thing, which was the whole entire point.

Okay? That's the story. The world has ended; and, for this guy who hates to go outside, nothing changes. Duh. It took one student out of...some number I didn't count to catch that, to the surprise of the rest of the class, and of the guy who's read the thing a dozen times, printed it out, and decided to use it as a literary example of...something. So that's vastly amusing, to me.

Apparently, I was a little too subtle about ending the world.

That aside, things went well. And, that having been the first class, Hebe read the story aloud a little differently in the next one, now understanding a little more about the various overly subtle hints along the way. And more questions, few of which had solid answers. And so on. Oh, and the best part: a couple of them knew who I was, were big fans of NotS, and—really weird—didn't want me dead. So, how cool is that....

I guess it didn't matter that I left the books at home. Based on Hebe telling everyone what I really do, they all stampeded online to grab copies of Paroxysm and Lurkers and stuff. I guess.

The plan at the moment is to go back and do this again tomorrow, for another couple of classes. So, apparently, I'm here all week. And then, given that this was actually kinda fun, I might have to rethink my position on booksignings a little. Though I'm pretty sure I still oppose them for all the reasons the Novelist mentioned in Lurkers. I've just kinda got that internal thing between Jay Mewes and Kev Smith going on now: Being an extra in a film is cool; we get free food and seven hundred bucks a day, just to be here; we should do this every day! But...we make our own films; we get all that anyway, and more money for it on our own....

I dunno. Maybe it's that, fundamentally, I'm still a scientist here. The lecture circuit in a school is somehow nobler than sitting around in a bookstore offering to talk to people if they'll buy a book. That just still ain't me.

More later....

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