Day 82: Stephen King Occasionally Has Awful Dialogue

            Some of Stephen King's dialogue is the worst.  I don't want to take any out of context because that's what morons do.  But some of it's bad.

            My favorite adjective is "shitty".  It's a great descriptor.  Dialogue is definitely my weakest point, so I should talk.  Sorry, Stephen.

            Most often a "leap of faith" is more a "leap of rationality".  The conclusions to some arguments don't make any sense.  I'm mainly talking about politics.  I don't really want to get into it though, having too good of a day so far.

            All I needed was "more culture" all along!  I was crazy for not knowing that.  Nothing more affirming as some culture.  Reading this website, www.thoughtcatalog.com has been a good experience.

            The way Otto stomped around gave the shack an impermanent feeling.  He was like a bull in a china shop in his own house.  The amount of shit on the walls that should have fallen down by this point was perplexing, and the amount of value Otto put on his work was outrageously low.

            Roger picked up a framed five by five picture from the chunk-of-wood table with the mounted buck on it.  It showed Otto shirtless with a night and day farmers tan with his arm around a woman wearing a powder blue sundress, her face and head concealed completely by a straw hat and roundframed sunglasses.  Jim snatched it from his hand and set it back down on the wooden slab.

            “That’s Otto’s wife, we don’t want to remind him of her.  Things didn’t end well.”

            “Is she… dead?”  Roger asked.

            “No, she just left him.  Old Otto has a volatile temper, as you’d imagine.”

            (She’s going to be with Mr. Grey later on, that’s how it’ll turn out.  Writing this so I see it in the proofreading)

            “What are we doing here, then?  How is he going to help us, did you even tell him we were coming?”

            “That isn’t how Otto works.”  Jim laughed at the idea like it was absurd; a compliment to Roger’s sense of humor.  “You don’t call Otto, Otto doesn’t do you favors.  You get him riled up enough about something and he’ll help you like it’s his idea.  It’s called a “Long Con”, although I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

            A policecar flew past on the interstate, the gush of wind surrounding it sounding like a mist spraying over the side of the shack.  A meadowlark sung as sweetly as the wind through the trees.  Somewhere the robots gears grinded through the streets.

            Otto was presumably preoccupied with something he was finding for Jim.  He dug intensively dug through the box in his room like a kid digging through a toy chest.  Glancing down when he heard rustling, it appeared something in his living room was important to him. 

            The dead buck head was pointed in Roger’s directions.  The eyes couldn’t have been real deer eyes anymore, they were wide and bright white with dilated pupils.  They looked like cubed sour milk.  It peered pleadingly at Roger, either asking for help or attempting to convey a warning.

            Jim rose and went to use Otto’s bathroom, the outhouse.  Those cappucinos.  He exited through the front door quckly, in spite of Roger’s tacit protests.  Roger sat with his hands in his lap, back straight and feet firmly on the ground.  He could hear his own heartbeat, it felt like he was in a doctors office waiting for test results.  He wished Otto had a pet that he could play with, then immediately retracted this wish when he thought about what Otto’s pet would be.  The deer continued glaring.

            “So you said Mr. Grey kidnapped your girls, is that what happened?”  Otto called from upstairs, breaking the silence with a pickaxe.  The old house noises of boards shifting and groaning under his weight combined with the crickets for ambience.  “That son of a bitch.”  Next, he made a series of unintelligable growls.

            “He did.  Jim was living out in my garage and he created some crazy robot head.  The robot head let all hell loose, and they swept in and took them away.”  Roger said, feeling like Josef K in The Trial.  It was one of those tired facts that was brought up again and again, like he had been a previous lottery winner or a childstar.  Otto continued to dig, it was about five minutes later.  “You’re the guy has people over and just digs through a box upstairs?  You know how to find this Mr. Grey, can we get on with it already?”

            Otto chortled and gave up his search for a second.  “Someone with daughters should have a little more patience than that.  You’re just going to have to wait I’ll be back down in just a minute.  In the meantime, you can go help yourself in the fridge if it will put you at ease.”

            Roger shivered at the prospect.  He sat still for a minute, ignoring the offer, but his stomach started to quake.  At high stress times, his appetite was at his worst.  Everyone has a different nervous tic, some people clean, some people do laundry, others cry in the fetal position, he was an eater.  Before Sandy was born, he hadn’t slept more than four hours a night for the whole gestation period.  This is when he had given up all of his hobbies, his bad habits, cleansed himself of interesting quarks much in the same way his wife had changed her appetite.  He was ready to spring outside at a moments notice, bring the car around to the front of the house and book it for the hospital. Miranda’s disposition had remained cool all along, she became calm and tranquil like a dying person who accepted the pangs of mortality.  Instead, those drives often ended up being to fast food restaurants, or missions to fill the pantry with frozen foods and junk food.

            He pulled the refridgerator open with a sticky peeling noise.  Piles of meat sat on plates, with varieties of barbeque sauces filling the doors on each side.  It looked like a primordial proving ground, like these animals had been reduced completely to their delicious carcasses.  He didn’t trust the plates sitting out in the open the way the way they were, without the applicatioon of seran wrap, but still a particular plate of ribs caught his eye.  A microwave would have made things a lot easier.  As it was, he prepared a burner on the gas stove.

            Jim exited the dank outhouse and shook with a flaccid autonomy over his own body.  His skin had become pale and he perpetually felt like he had woken up from a cold sweat.  He stared at the shack; it was windowless from the back side.  He looked over at the smaller chained up shack, it was in a blind spot.  A baby chick walked lackadaisically out from the four by foured doors, stretching its tiny toes out as it walked.

            One of the more interesting things about doing this blog is I've been able to objectively identify what works better for me and what doesn't.  Like most people, I'm a lot more effective when I have a deadline.  I get a lot more done on days that I have to go to work.