Do words make you dizzy, and long sentences drowsy? Do sarcasm and satire give you flu-like symptoms? Wait, wait, would you like me to whip up a pretty flash presentation instead?
I’m Karl, and I’m an acquired taste.
In 1997 I took a left turn at photography, swerved sharply towards web programming in ’98, and skid to avoid software engineering (and slow death) a few years later; I tumbled down a cliff of unemployment into a car cemetery. Shakespeare was roasting quail, there beneath a tent he’d fashioned out of sonnets and a rusted 1963 Honda. This was well into 2006, and I’ve been a full-time editor ever since. Not making any sense? Yeah, humor me.
Selling articles back home (Lebanon) is about as easy as selling canned sand (is this a cultural crack about Arabs and deserts? Oh yeah) but with time and luck I was contracted by a local publication, then two, then an international publication, then two, and finally when the kitchen got too hot and the instant coffee too mild, I broke off and spread my hairy wings. There isn’t enough whiskey in the world to endure a bad job, or incompetent management.
This here website (pardner) carries a few hopes with it. I like reaching out to people, mostly to entertain (myself) and educate (us both), and show the modern world that we *gasp* no longer commute on camels – I of course own a camel ranch, but they’re modern and soft spoken camels, not at all barbaric – and while I’m at it perhaps kick some countrymen straight in the nostalgia, and remind that we’re all in love with the same woman, despite our differences.
Please hold for presumptuousness. Thank you.
This site is also a place for friends, old and new. And while the bastards that call themselves my friends have managed to scatter across the globe, it is my hope that they will pop in once in a while, and let the rest of us know how they’re doing.
I’m a reformed software engineer, but I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t write, or exactly when the programmer slit his wrists. I do know that I was uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I found my voice, an elusive skank of a muse through which writers define their work. For me, Ambrose Bierce was that skank.
See, a style without a name can’t really exist – if a random tree falls down in a forest, who gives a crap? But call the tree Roger… So when someone asked me what I wrote, I knew I had to do better than: ‘Well, ya’ know, it’s like… well not so much…’ And Ambrose here had a clear voice, a clean minimalistic approach and didn’t give a Mesocricetus auratus’s (really, just Google it) ass what people thought. He worked as an editor and a journalist, and fought in a war he later milked for material, and rightly so. I’ve had more war and less editing, more software and fewer short stories, but whatever he wrote resonated with me; I just knew what he meant. I was in love.
Satire is my favorite adult-education tool, and he so excelled with it that I often trashed my own attempts before they had a chance to mature. With the right word in the right place he could strip down preconceptions like they were some analogy I don’t really need to come up with.
Because that’s what it’s all about in my corner of the world: it’s about violent, barely sentient masses blindly following religious and political leaders as though they held the keys to heaven, and could solve everything from famine to bowel consistency. And while you could politely ask a zombie to unhand the brains and adopt a vegetarian lifestyle, modern gaming has statistically shown that shotguns are more effective.
Satire is a literary shotgun; there is nothing quite as fascinating as making a man feel like an idiot in the privacy of his own mind. It kicks the hive mind and creates a vacuum, and forces the suddenly isolated idiot to think for himself. There are no guarantees where he’ll go from there, but it is a fighting chance; and for every nitwit I kick in the brain, I’m assured a shot of scotch in heaven. Oh wait – the Druze reincarnate; well I suppose there’s no rush then.
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