Tuesday, January 20, 2009

I feel all warm and tingly...

About my prose now.  Here's what happens when really bad science writing hits the streets:
First thing that happens when you have a heart attack, an unlucky part of your heart turns white. The blood’s stopped pumping to that spot, so it becomes pink-speckled bloodlessness, coarse and cool like grapefruit gelatin.
This is the moment when, if they could think, these heart cells in this new poor part of town would go, “Well, shit.” Mortal things have a godly way of knowing when they’ll die.
Next comes the back-alley bruise of organ death. The cells turn from white to black, all shitted up like a body pit in a war, two weeks after. Suddenly, soldier, this part of your heart is dead, only it’s still in your body, attached to the good section — the 90210 ventricle — and the good part is smirking, it’s saying, “Come on, rebuild yourself, man!”
But the dead part can’t fix itself. And the healthy part can’t throw it a bloody rope. So the whole heart begins to die — 650,000 American deaths a year.
But now look here, a woman. She is a pretty lady of Pakistani heritage who highlights her soccer-mom layers, which you don’t expect from a lab-worn doctor-lady. And she’s got ideas. Wild ones. Hina Chaudhry believes she can do what the body can’t: fix the dead parts. [More - unfortunately]
Umm, OK.  Does it make me a bad person that I didn't go nuts when I read it - or that the picture skewed my judgment?

While admittedly the Internet and bozos like me have lowered the bar for good writing, maybe the sheer volume will make up for the quality.  Regardless,  the purists are not doing all that well right now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

John-maybe better working on cash flow calculations or waxing the combine as you may be reading or researching too much....really don't want too think about or know what is going on in my chest when the "big one" hits,,especially after having florida grapefruit for breakfast..back too bacon,eggs,sausage and ham for me-kevin

John Phipps said...

evin:

ya see - it's working on those cash flow calculations that is contributing to that colorful description of what's happening in your heart right now.

That said, the grapefruit picture is going to be some time getting erased in my memory too.